After-hours anaesthetists lost

A WESTERN Sydney emergency department, open 24 hours a day and treating 30,000 cases a year, will have no anaesthetists on duty outside business hours from today because of a dispute between the area health service and staff who are angry the hospital is being downgraded.

The debacle comes days after hospitals across the state reported suppliers had stopped delivering meat, vegetables, gloves, paper towels, morphine and bandages because they had not been paid in months.

Some specialists had not been paid in six weeks and nurses were buying supplies from shopkeepers using petty cash, forcing the Minister for Health, John Della Bosca, to order immediate payment to doctors and some suppliers late last week.

Now staff at Mount Druitt fear their hospital will soon close after being told all emergency surgery would stop from today, even though the hospital runs a 24-hour emergency department.

Sydney West Area Health Service reversed the decision to close all emergency surgery late last week, but it came too late for the director of anaesthesia at the hospital, Helen Currow, who had already submitted her annual roster. The roster, which was drawn up based on the ruling to stop emergency surgery, does not include anaesthetic cover from today until December.

“We have a hospital that sees 30,000 cases a year, 45 per cent of them are children, and we have no anaesthetists available on weekends for surgery,” a senior doctor said yesterday. “If they are going to have an emergency department, they have to back it up safely and properly. This is unconscionable, unacceptable and unethical. Someone will die.”

More than 300 people are expected to attend a public forum next week to demand the situation be resolved.

One of the organisers, Debbie Robertson, said the area health service was “playing games … and putting lives at risk”.

“We lost the intensive care unit in 2004, and that has made it more difficult to attract doctors to the hospital. We’ve got to at least have the capacity to deal with appendicitis or an abscess.”

Six surgeons, nine anaesthetists, four orthopedic surgeons and three nurses signed a letter opposing the closure of emergency surgery but were overruled by the area health service.

Last year Peter Garling, SC, in a report on acute services in hospitals, said Mount Druitt hospital was “fundamentally unsafe” because most doctors had quit after the intensive care unit was closed.

The hospital should be closed if emergency surgery was stopped, he said.

A report by the General Metropolitan Clinical Taskforce in 2005 recommended that the emergency department should be closed or rebadged as an acute care centre.

Ms Robertson said the socially disadvantaged residents of Mount Druitt would be hard hit.

“Most people don’t have transport of their own. Nepean hospital is bursting at the seams. What are people supposed to do?”

(By Kate Benson – Sydney Morning Herald)