I keep hearing this line "we've had 18 months to prepare the hospital system so staying shut to support hospitals is a lie".
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The first issue is that our health system, Australia wide, irrespective of politics, runs short at the best of time. Year after year of stopgaps, temporary staffing up, but at it's heart it is always about churning the max no. of patients through with the min safest staff number
The second is that there is physically nowhere to put the hundreds of extra patients because all the current beds are full. You can chip away at the edges, shuffle the deck a little, but you can't magic up hundreds of extra beds, ICU or general ward.
Hospital across this country are old. Decades of underinvestment has eroded them. No political party has ever felt it's a good idea to invest our tax revenue into health, and year after year, hospitals beg for cash for equipment and staff while the walls crack around them.
There is a strangely abusive thread that runs through hospitals, all hospitals (and I've worked in ten now), that rears its ugly head when you ask for things to improve the system. Most requests and concerns never make it through because the answer is always "don't ask".
As for ICU - to flog an undead horse, ventilators are nothing without people. And people are nothing without training. We've had 18 months to prepare but it takes 10 years to train an ICU doctor, and the ICU nurses probably just as long. It is beyond highly specialised.
And finally, if, in the perfect world scenario we had have found a magical well of trained staff and had the money to provide them and had hospitals to put them in - you still can't outrun a global pandemic. You can't outstaff thousands of people showing up at the door.
Which is why the path out is so crushingly slow. For all of the above reasons. We can't pull staff from other states because then their already full-for-other-reasons hospitals will be shorter than they are already and their patients will suffer even more.
Thank you for reading.
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