dedja wrote:Psyber, can you help me with this one mate ... I've got a live one here.
OK, another real life scenario but I doubt that he'll get this one either.
My 3rd daughter was born at WCH at 27 weeks (13 weeks prem) and spent 66 days in hospital (a public hospital) as a private patient.
The cost of her treatment was approx $100K, which was paid for by my health insurance. Therefore, the public health system had $100K more to spend treating other patients as WCH fully recovered all costs.
Glad to help mate.
Put simply, successive governments since I started my medical career have failed to provide adequate funding for medical staff, and equipment.
Any patient who has private insurance and can be diverted to a private hospital or private outpatient service shortens the waiting time for others.
Others who are treated as private at a public hospital bring additional funds to the public hospital system as did dedja. Yes, while those with private insurance certainly benefit themselves, they also benefit those who cannot afford it by this effect on waiting times.
The public hospital system would collapse without this safety valve.
In more detail:
Public hospitals are always underfunded, as politics and government is about appearance and statistics, not about real delivery of service.
I actually left the public service after a confrontation with administrators over cost cutting exercises that were harmful to patients, and being threatened with a demotion from my Team Leader position for daring to oppose it - I had arranged for the then SA Minister of Health to be taken on a tour of the situation and persuaded him to reverse the decision.
After this threat, I was disenchanted, and chose to go into private practice, where I could treat patients under my care properly, and many of my public patients went with me as I agreed to bulk bill them..
I had intended to stay in the public system, and the financial benefits of private practice were not my prime motivator.
As a junior doctor I worked anything from 80 to 130 hours a week at the RAH [yes there are 168 hours in a week] and could barely keep up with the load.
In fact at one time I passed out at work from exhaustion and had a few days off - covered by days in lieu of public holidays worked - not sick leave incidentally. [I was too naive and idealistic to go to my union then.]
In later years in the public system, while I had junior doctors doing the night shifts I was still flat out in my working hours and rarely ever left work on time. Even today, when immediately life threatening emergency presentations to the ER are dealt with immediately that means other patients wait longer - in the case of psychiatric patients sometimes 8 hours or more - to be seen.
Many of them just give up and go away and don't get included in the waiting time statistics.
Over the years I have seen several public patients here in SA die because it took too long to get attention, while
apparently more urgent cases got priority, or because the junior doctor dealing with them was barely conscious from exhaustion.
Paul Keating, who was one of the grand-standers for the anti private health lobby, was fine without private insurance.
If he turned up at a public hospital when he was PM he would be jumped to the head of the queue, and an off duty senior consultant called in regardless of additional cost.
Anyone else without his status would get the junior registrar - usually a second or third year graduate - who had in all likelihood already been on duty to long to be at peak concentration.
While it is true that doctors are no longer rostered on quite such ridiculous and dangerous hours, they still work too long to be entirely on the ball at all times.
Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 7:25 pm
