Stakeholders are struggling to iron out teething problems at the Sunshine Coast University Private Hospital (SCUPH) to ensure it maintains high patient safety standards.
Over 4,000 public patients have been referred to and received care at the hospital since it opened in December last year.
And while patient satisfaction is reportedly high at the Ramsay Health Care facility a different story is being played out behind-the-scenes.
The ABC understands vital equipment has been missing during surgery, with staff forced to leave the theatre to search for the equipment, and vital wards have been left short-staffed.
Australian Medical Association branch councillor Dr Wayne Herdy says structural problems such as these should have been solved within months of the hospital’s opening.
“There have been some problems with the health professionals working out whose job it is to do what in something, where nobody’s ever really defined clearly who is going to do what,” he said.
“So there has been some trouble getting this working properly, but it’s only going to be a fairly short time before everything’s working as smoothly as we want it to.”
Dr Herdy says he expected teething problems at SCUPH because it is the first Queensland private hospital to treat such a large number of public patients.
The hospital is contracted to treat 12,000 public patients a year until June 2018.
Dr Herdy says all of the relevant stakeholders are working to correct the reported problems.
“The hospital owners, the administration, the managers, the CEO are all working quite hard and they are in frequent communication with the private doctors through the local medical association, and of course the public hospital board, to make sure this kind of thing is identified as early as possible and corrective measures are put in place as early as possible,” he said.
“We are getting information, we’re having discussions and nobody’s trying to cover anything up.”
Dr Herdy says there are still problems with staffing rosters.
“If a doctor takes a patient into the hospital and he is going to have the next few days off, then who is going to have responsibility for that patient in his absence – that sort of stuff just hasn’t been sorted out yet,” he said.
“We would have liked to have seen that happen within the first few months of the operation, but there are a few personalities there and there are some people who aren’t used to working in that environment.”
Ramsay Health Care reply
A spokesperson from SCUPH says the hospital has had teething problems because of a high work load, performing “almost 4,000 surgical cases and admitting over 5,300 patients” since opening in December.
“At times, in the early months, this large and complex caseload did put a strain on supplies, which is natural in the start-up phase of a new hospital,” the spokeperson said.
The spokesperson says despite the hiccups patient care has not been impacted and that “we were able to source supplies quickly and easily from other Ramsay locations in the area.”
“The hospital has implemented processes to cope with the workload and is very proud of the achievements of its staff and doctors to date,” the spokesperson said.
Chairman of the Sunshine Coast University Hospital Action Group Maureen Myleham says she has heard rumours of problems at SCUPH.
“There have been some problems relayed to me but whether they can be verified is the another thing,” she said.
“Until it’s put in writing there’s not much we can do.”
Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service contracts 110 beds for public patients a SCUPH.
They declined to comment and referred the ABC to Ramsay Health Care to answer concerns of teething problems at SCUPH.
Source: ABC