Birchip Forum Special meeting
Held at 8.00pm at the Buloke Shire Council Birchip Offices on Monday 5 February 2007.
Present: Ken Round – Rob Bulmer – Peter
Ferrier – Roger Bragg – Sue Ferrier - Robyn Ferrier – Dawn McCallum – Danny
Stone – Angela Liston – Eddie Lee – Bill Quick - Sue Davis – Neil Davis – Kath
Lehmann – Mrs Noonan – Betty Connelly – Mrs Round – Cheryl Watson Wendy Buteux
– Roma Hogan – Val Lee – Frances Lee – Bern Hogan – John Bales – Dorothy Jolly
– Val Hogan – Carly Sharp –
Apologies: Rosie Rickard
Birchip Forum president welcomed all present and explained that the East Wimmera Health Service (EWHS) board had extended us an open offer to come and talk at our meetings. This was the first opportunity available and the Birchip Forum was very happy to have them attend.
Gail started the meeting by explaining that issues had been raised at the Birchip Forum and that the meeting was to seek answers to those issues. There are four main issues the forum would like answered then the meeting will call for questions from the floor.
Issue 1.
There appears to be a gradual decline in
services offered by the
The community is worried that in an emergency people may be at risk because the equipment is not available. The x-ray machine is either gone or has been decommissioned so cannot be used, and amongst other things, there are no longer forceps available to help in the emergency delivery of a baby.
Ken round responded saying that it is not viable to keep equipment in hospitals where there is no one licenced to operate the equipment. It is a much better use of resources to place the equipment in a place where it can be used and if operators become available in Birchip then the EWHS would look to replacing the equipment.
Ken also pointed out that in the medical field equipment quickly became outdated so if a machine was left for a couple of years unused, it may be obsolete and have had no use, by the time someone was able to use it.
The x-ray service had been contracted out
to a firm in
EWHS is still looking to try and get a service in Birchip on a fortnightly basis but until someone will shift to the bush this is unlikely.
Ambulances and babies in the bush.
The community is very concerned about the distance that has to be travelled to have babies. There are two issues here firstly they do not have the opportunity to have there baby delivered in Birchip and secondly Birchip does not have an ambulance.
We would like to know how we can get doctors to deliver babies in Birchip and secondly how can we get an ambulance service in Birchip.
The response was that to deliver babies you need to have 2 doctors an anaesthetist and the doctor had to deliver 80 babies a year just to cover the insurance costs (St.Arnaud delivered 4 last year). Another issue with this is that if there are not a number of babies being delivered it is difficult to keep the nursing staff trained to a satisfactory level of proficiency. If they do not have this it causes high levels of stress on the nurses and the patient will often choose to go elsewhere because they think the service will be better and safer at a larger hospital.
With ambulances it was suggested that lobbying the government was about the only choice. EWHS has no say in the ambulance service. They did point out though, that it was always worth calling for an ambulance (instead of going in the car yourself) so that the need for an ambulance could be better justified.
From the floor came the comment - that it seemed strange that a paramedic with limited training was able to deliver a baby in the back of an ambulance without insurance worries while a doctor with specific training in this field would be unable to deliver a baby without two other doctors and nursing staff to help him and even then he would stil have insurance worries.
It was also pointed out that guidelines and policies were continually raising the standards making medicine in the bush unaffordable on a per head basis and because of this the raising of safety standards was actually making life less safe for those in the bush.
Nursing home and acute beds.
People are only allowed to stay in an acute bed in hospital for 35(?) days and then they must be shifted to a nursing home. If the nursing home in Birchip is full this means removing them from their family and loved ones and taken to another nursing home in a town far away. The family cannot visit because there is no public transport from Birchip to enable this to happen.
Often when they are shifted the bed they leave remains empty. Why can’t they stay in the bed in Birchip?
Ken Round answered this by saying that the acute beds are funded by State funds and Nursing homes are Federal funds and the bed fees cannot be transferred between the different sources.
The EWHS board is looking at various ways to overcome this problem and is meeting with the appropriate people to expedite this process but as yet have not succeeded and they asked us to be patient a little longer. They pointed out that their record in such matters was far ahead of most and they had a firm belief they would overcome this problem.
They did suggest that lobbying John Forrest on this matter would be a good idea.
Issue 4
A rumour was heard that the EWHS had
considered closing the
The response was that this had been brought up at a meeting but was quickly dismissed. However Rob Bulmer did say there were several reasons this could be a good solution. The current nursing staff is under stress because they have shortages and therefore don’t have as much choice in their rosters as they would like and if staff became sick this put an even bigger burden on the remaining staff. Staff are currently owed 11 years in holiday and long service entitlements. A two-week closure would ease this problem and relieve a lot of stress on some of the nursing staff.
Job Availability
Currently 1.6 jobs available for Div 1 nurses but Danny Stone made it quite clear if we could find 2 people to fill these jobs he would employ them both full time.
EWHS is bottom line funded because it is a small rural hospital not case mix funded like a lot of hospitals.
Lobbying needs to highlight our isolation because comparatively we don’t use the hospital enough.
We need to find out how the bed placement ratio is worked out and exactly where our region is so that we can argue with some knowledge of the subject.
Buloke Shire Council needs to have more input with and communication with the EWHS board.
When EWHS was formed the money in the bank at each of the towns was kept separate to be spent specifically in each town and some of this is being spent on doctors practice running costs.
EWHS gets no funding for doctors houses, doctors Cars or doctor’s children’s educational expenses and these are thing often offered to doctors to entice them to a town.
When Ahmed leaves Birchip it is quite likely that EWHS will look at getting doctors from some sort of private doctor company because they have very little funding left to spend on trying to attract another doctor.
The meeting felt we should make a motion to be put to the next forum meeting and then run it by the EWHS board before passing it.
From this meeting it is my observation that there needs to be much more communication between the Birchip Forum and the EWHS Board and probably between the EWHS Board and the community.