Labor’s Hypocrisy – secret and ignored hospital report revealed

Labor’s hypocrisy on health has been revealed with the tabling in Parliament today of a secret report on the Royal Hobart Hospital.
Commissioned by the former Labor-Green Government, the 2012 Monaghan Report was never released and the issues raised were totally ignored.
The report highlights a litany of bad management, backlogs, ramping and hospital wide issues.
It recommended escalation measures which the Liberal Government has implemented and are now being targeted for political purposes.
It came at the same time Labor was cutting health and sacking frontline health staff.
Unlike the former Government we released our own Review of Emergency Care and are fixing the problems that it identified.
A significant recommendation from the 2012 Monaghan Report was:
“The development of a mechanism to alert the hospital to ED overcrowding and a Ramping response, and a practical hospital escalation policy that initiates processes that actually respond in a real sense to the overcrowding situation and engages inpatient staff.”
We are addressing this with our Patients First plan which we are implementing across Tasmania’s hospitals, as well as opening 50 new beds, and we have employed clinical initiative nurses in our Emergency Departments and Extended Care Paramedics on the road in Hobart and Launceston.
Why Labor would want to highlight an overdue initiative to assist our busy EDs can only be explained by its own hypocrisy and lack of any policy alternative.
Michael Ferguson, Minister for Health