Rooty Hill Village nursing home is a five-minute drive from Mount Druitt Hospital. One can imagine, then, the surprise of emergency staff at Nepean Hospital, a 20-minute drive away, every time a resident from Rooty Hill arrives at their department in an ambulance.
Mount Druitt has a 24-hour emergency department – but it doesn’t admit medical or surgical patients, who are instead transferred to Blacktown Hospital for care.
“Ambulance officers and local residents know this, so these patients do not present to Mount Druitt hospital … [and] Nepean Hospital is seeing more and more patients from the Mount Druitt catchment area,” writes senior emergency physician Dr James Mallows.
The emergency department at Nepean Hospital is “routinely overwhelmed”, according to senior doctor James Mallows. Credit: James Brickwood
The result, Mallows says in a submission to the NSW government’s inquiry into health spending, is an emergency department that is routinely overwhelmed and a hospital at crisis point.
“We look forward to school holidays purely because of a predictable drop in ED presentations,” he says. “There is no long-term solution on the horizon.”
The NSW government inquiry begins on Monday and will scrutinise the state’s biggest annual outlay – $33.043 billion is to be spent in the 2023-24 financial year.
Led by Commissioner Richard Beasley, SC, the inquiry will investigate: health funding arrangements and how they relate to quality and accessible healthcare; the different models of service delivery; and, the experiences of patients, healthcare workers and other stakeholders.
It will be a challenge. Most frontline workers could earn far more in other states, owing to the recently abolished public service wages cap. The mortality rate for the most disadvantaged people in NSW is 53 per cent higher than that of the least disadvantaged, and funding for local health districts is more unequal now than at any point since 1995.
This, Mallows writes, is best highlighted by looking at where Sydney’s hospitals are built; there are nearly twice as many east of Parramatta than there are to its west, which is significant given that Parramatta is the geographical heart of Sydney.
The map that shows Sydneysiders’ unequal access to medical care
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25.11.2023
Rooty Hill Village nursing home is a five-minute drive from Mount Druitt Hospital. One can imagine, then, the surprise of emergency staff at Nepean Hospital, a 20-minute drive away, every time a resident from Rooty Hill arrives at their department in an ambulance.
Mount Druitt has a 24-hour emergency department – but it doesn’t admit medical or surgical patients, who are instead transferred to Blacktown Hospital for care.
“Ambulance officers and local residents know this, so these patients do not present to Mount Druitt hospital … [and] Nepean........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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