Victoria’s four neonatal intensive-care units have been overflowing with seriously ill babies for the past three weeks, so that women with high-risk pregnancies and their babies may have to be flown interstate, doctors say.
Hospital staff also fear a shortage of intensive-care cots in Victoria is exposing pregnant women and vulnerable infants to sub-standard care as overwhelmed doctors and nurses struggle to meet demand.
Leaked documents show that on Wednesday Melbourne’s four specialist units at the Royal Children’s, Royal Women’s, Monash Medical Centre and Mercy hospitals were collectively caring for 204 babies, more than the system’s maximum ”flex up” capacity of 195 neonatal intensive-care and special-care nursery cots.
This meant the units were listed as ”closed” or ”restricted” for new patients, meaning high-risk pregnant women and critically ill babies might have to go interstate. Senior hospital sources said the units had been similarly under pressure for about three weeks, with at least one woman transferred across Melbourne to give birth in another hospital.
One Victorian woman is believed to have been flown interstate to give birth in recent months, too, however it is unclear whether this was because of a shortage of intensive-care resources or because she was geographically closer to a hospital in South Australia, the ACT or NSW.
Doctors and nurses said the shortage of intensive-care beds had also caused the delaying of some births that needed to be induced for the baby’s health as staff frantically searched for a neonatal intensive-care place.
Furthermore, they said, while dozens of women had been flown interstate to give birth in previous years in such crises, it appears hospital chief executives have been told by the government not to do this because it was ”too politically sensitive in an election year”.
Instead, doctors and nurses are being made to fit the sick babies into cramped hospitals any way they can, even if there are not enough staff to care for them.
”It is so dangerous,” said one nurse who did not want to be named. ”If it was my baby, I’d be demanding to get on a plane to get out of here.”
Both the Australian Medical Association and Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation said the shortage of neonatal intensive-care resources in Victoria was risky and unacceptable.
While the Victorian government in its May budget committed $4 million for new cots and $5.6 million a year in recurrent funding for five new neonatal intensive-care cots, the AMA and ANMF said it was not enough.
”We would ask the government to sit down with our colleagues … and carefully assess the true and appropriate response,” Dr Tony Bartone, president of the Victorian AMA, said. ”If you have overcrowding on a regular basis, it puts pressure on the care.”
Paul Gilbert, assistant secretary of the Victorian ANMF, said the shortage of resources meant some babies were being discharged too soon and cared for in inappropriate environments, such as in post-natal wards, when they should be in specialist nurseries.
”Care is being compromised simply because there are not enough cots … and from day to day, not enough staffing,” he said.
”The political damage of sending babies interstate, which is what used to happen, is now being overcome by transferring babies out of NICU [neonatal intensive care units] into less intensive areas. One was politically unsavoury, the other is just dangerous.”
One doctor who did not want to be named said staff were angry the government had funded five new NICU cots without any more special care nursery cots to go with them because the latter are required for babies to ”step down” to before they go home.
”They are largely useless if not associated with the level 2 step-down beds, as otherwise they just become jammed up with convalescent babies,” the doctor said.
A spokesman for Victorian Health Minister David Davis would not comment on whether Victorian women or babies had been sent interstate recently but said the system was ”experiencing high demand”.