Victorian Labor has promised $200 million to open closed hospital beds if it wins this Saturday’s state election.
The money would pay the wages of doctors, nurses and other staff to allow hospitals to reopen beds that are current closed.
Labor has already promised an audit of hospital bed numbers, to be conducted by former AMA (Australian Medical Association) boss, Dr Doug Travis.
Labor leader Daniel Andrews said hospital beds across Victoria were sitting empty because there was no staff to care for the extra patients.
“There’s no capital works needed, these beds are here,” he said.
“If only we fund health properly to pay the wages of the nurses and other staff, the doctors and other staff who provide care to those patients.”
Mr Andrews said the money would be spent over four years and Labor would allocate more funding for hospital beds if that was what Dr Travis recommended.
“Of course we would,” he said.
“But there does need to be extra money provided with some urgency and there certainly needs to be a full and frank accounting for the beds that could be opened treating patients.”
Dr Travis said his audit would examine every public hospital and identify if beds were not being used.
“Most hospitals will have theatres or beds that could be better used,” he said.
“It’s very hard to quantitate at this point how many beds, how many nurses, how many doctors because what we’re looking for is capacity that hospitals actually have.”
“I will need to ask them what they can do in their environment.”
It was expected the hospital bed audit would be completed by next March.
The Coalition promised, in 2010, that it would add 800 beds to the hospital system and maintains that it has done so.
But Dr Travis said there was no way of knowing whether that promise had been fulfilled.
“I have no idea about the 800 beds because I have no way of measuring what beds there are in the hospital system,” he said.
“It’s a complicated difficult issue because there are lots and lots of different types of beds.”
The Coalition has announced plans to upgrade a number of hospitals around metropolitan and regional Victoria if it is re-elected.
It has also committed $70 million to build a dedicated cardiac wing – the Monash Heart Hospital – at Clayton, as well as pour $98 million into an expansion of the Northern Hospital at Epping.