Michael Lumsden-Steel
Look, obviously we have concerns about what the ongoing future of Hobart Private Healthscope Hospital is going to be. Ultimately, who’s going to take it over? Will it be Healthscope that does a Phoenix as a not-for-profit or will it be another hospital provider that takes over? The main thing that we need to stress is that Hobart and particularly Tasmania needs that hospital to keep functioning with the theatres, the operating theatres that it has, as well as endoscopy and that medical dimension suite which does coronary angiograms, treats patients having heart attacks, cardiac stents, as well as now doing more technical procedures to do with the heart including atrial fibrillation and complex procedures which can get rid of patients’ arrhythmias. So whoever takes over the hospital needs to continue going because it also provides statewide private gynaecology surgery as well as significant upper GI cancer surgery and also a significant amount of bariatric surgery happens at that hospital. It concerns me, I guess, that we hear that staff are potentially having to take a pay cut or forego what should be their entitlement as a salary packaging benefit to keep the new not-for-profit hospital structure afloat and that to me raises alarm bells. I know the staff feel very vulnerable, they feel like they should accept it potentially to keep the hospital going so they’ve got a job but they should never be asked by their employer to forego a benefit so that the hospital can remain viable. That to me sounds like the business model is under stress and how long is that going to be sustainable?
Lucy Breaden
And I’ve got some texts as well from people that work there and they’re mentioning that they’ve had to change or they voted on changing their EBA to enable salary packaging and they say I voted no but I’ll get to those texts in a moment. Is there any understanding that closure is imminent or is it just plodding along each day and you know trying to get to the end of the day?
Michael Lumsden-Steel
Look it’s very unclear to us what the long-term roadmap actually is going to be and you know we are hopeful obviously that this is running through a national process that will end up with an outcome. Now what we need to do is have another provider, whoever that is, step in and keep that hospital going. The next question has got to be asked though I guess is strategic. We have concerns that and this is just purely speculation we know that federally Calvary has indicated they might have some interest in some health scope facilities. The concern would be that should Calvary take over the facility in Hobart they need to work around how they can continue to allow the surgeries that occur there at the moment which include some operations which for religious reasons Calvary does not allow to happen at their hospitals and that includes procedures such as patients having IVF and other procedures that are completely appropriate and medically indicated but for religious grounds Calvary doesn’t know how to occur. So I guess if Calvary for example was to take over the running of the hospital in Hobart and this is speculation we would need to make sure that we work around how they could have exemptions or measures in place to continue to provide that option because the risk could be that Tasmania can no longer provide or offer certain surgeries because they need to be done at a major hospital and we know up in northern Tasmania the other private hospital they’re both Calvary’s and we also know that in Launceston Calvary’s just lost three of their theatres so we do know that operating theatres are a scarce resource in Tasmania at the moment. Look we will clearly look forward to a resolution being found but long-term strategically one has to ask the question that Hobart private hospital facility site has to be coming towards its end of its life without having significant major infrastructure upgrades and you know the AMA is strongly pushing for the government to actually get together and have a long-term strategic infrastructure hospital plan location for southern Tasmania. We need a new Royal Hobart hospital and if we’re going to have one of those using what we can at K-block that would be the time for there to be strategic discussions around a new private hospital being built that can synergistically work with the new public hospital so there’s obviously keeping this hospital going but then we need some strategic vision and road mapping forward for setting the hospital infrastructure up to be sustainable and successful.