NSW Premier Mike Baird will light “an absolute powder-keg” and face a statewide industrial campaign if he moves to privatise more of the state’s hospital system, health union boss Gerard Hayes has warned.
Mr Hayes, the NSW general secretary of the Health Services Union, said maintaining state healthcare in public hands ranked as the top issue which galvanised health workers.
“This will be a statewide campaign,” he said.
In comments only days after becoming Premier, Mr Baird suggested his government would make greater use of public-private partnerships to design, build and operate hospitals.
He also raised the prospect of contracting out more services, such as cleaning, and using private hospitals to provide public patient care.
“My government will continue to look for ways to transform and improve healthcare, to deliver the best care in the best way possible,” Mr Baird told The Australian.
The previous Labor government attempted to bring private sector funding and practices to public health by letting out the redevelopment and day-to-day management of Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital.
The Coalition under Barry O’Farrell maintained that process, but in his early statements as Premier, Mr Baird has indicated he intends to speed up policy implementation and reform, and said he favours public-private partnerships.
“NSW leads the nation in the use of public-private partnerships for the delivery of key infrastructure, with about $8.7 billion of projects in the pipeline,” Mr Baird told The Australian. “Given the limits on our resources, there is a need to involve the private sector, in innovative ways, as we seek to repair the $30bn infrastructure backlog left behind by NSW Labor.
“Last year we signed a historic agreement with the private sector to design, build, operate and maintain the new Northern Beaches Hospital.”
Labor leader John Robertson said the new Premier “needs to understand that he cannot run our state’s hospitals like an investment bank”.
“Mike Baird should be making things easier for families, not putting more pressure on household bills and making hospitals operate for profit,” he said.
Mr Hayes said the hybrid public-private hospital experiments had led to “much complexity in relation to who’s the boss”, and a conflict between the interests of the private enterprises to maximise profits for shareholders, and the interests of patients in getting maximum services in health care.
He also said a suggestion by Mr Baird that more “non-clinical” services could be contracted out to the private sector would further dilute public administration of state hospitals, with the prospect that psychologist, physiotherapist and other allied health services could go that way.
Source: The Australian