Coalition committed to hospital restructure in NSW and Queensland

Peter Dutton

EVERY major public hospital in NSW and Queensland would be given its own management board and be controlled by the community, under a new policy announced by the coalition.

Boards would be made up of community representatives, a director of nursing, a chairman of medical staff, and a chief executive officer, and would be given the power to set hospital funding and oversee levels of care.

In NSW the move would be coupled with the abolition of area health bureaucracies, the opposition says.

The boards would make hospitals more accountable and clear the “systemic malaise” currently present in the two states' public hospitals, Mr Abbott said.

“They need to be boards which have strong expertise which are also representative of the people working in the hospitals and the people being served by the hospitals,” Mr Abbott told reporters in Sydney.

“That is the change that our public hospital system needs. That is the change that the next coalition government will urgently implement.

“Particularly in NSW and Queensland, where chronic systemic mismanagement really requires federal intervention along the lines of the intervention in the Northern Territory's remote communities back in 2007.”

Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton said the policy amounted to “direct action”.

“Kevin Rudd's been talking for two years about doing something on hospitals but he hasn't acted,” Mr Dutton said.

“Tony Abbott has been in the role for about two months and he's announced real action, direct action to fixing this long-term problem which Kevin Rudd talks about in a bureaucratic way but he always fails to act on.”

Wentworth MP Malcolm Turnbull pointed to Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital, which is run by its own board, as a demonstration of the way the coalition's policy could work.

AAP

the provision of cash will continue under a coalition government only if there are changes to the principles of management.

skippy. wrote on Feb 16^th, 2010 at 11:44am:


See above - hospitals, like schools and police and roads, area the responsibility of the states, according to the constitution. But now that the states have proved themselves incapable of managing their responsibiliities, the burden will have to be wrested away from them. Or rather, they will have to give it up, in the form of an agreement (because of the constitution).
Such things are slightly more complicated in real democracies like Australia, than in 'people's democracies' where an ukase from the dear leader's bitch is all it takes.