Health Minister Kim Hames has defended the private contractor tasked with handling non-clinical services at Perth’s recently opened Fiona Stanley Hospital, despite revelations it has been stripped of control of sterilising equipment due to a contract breach.
Under its contract with WA Health, Serco – a UK conglomerate which also runs prisons and provides security in detention centres – must sterilise medical equipment and return it within 24 hours, or three hours for emergencies.
However, Fiona Stanley Hospital chief executive David Russell-Weisz conceded the equipment was not being delivered on time to theatres, forcing the hospital to bring in extra staff from WA Health to lead the process and ensure surgeons had equipment on time.
A spokeswoman for the hospital said that could last six to eight weeks.
Doctors at the hospital told the ABC the delays had been so bad they had to cancel or delay patient operations, with implications for patient safety.
The Opposition seized on the revelations, with health spokesman Roger Cook calling on the Government to rip up the contract with Serco.
“I’ve always advocated for clinical related services to be undertaken by the state, for the state,” he said.
“This is a public hospital, not a private plaything, and it’s important that the Department of Health continue to run the sterilisation services, because they have a very important impact on the quality of clinical care for patients at Fiona Stanley Hospital.
“Privatising hospital services at Fiona Stanley was a key initiative to save money, but what we have seen is that it’s compromised services at the hospital, and patient safety.”
Dr Hames said Serco was merely experiencing “teething problems” in just one of 25 areas of service at the new hospital, which opened on February 3.
“We have had some difficulties, some teething problems with getting all the systems in place and operating well, and one of the complicating factors is all the equipment, which has to come from other hospitals, be catalogued, be put into the system, and be part of that sterilisation process,” he said.
“There are some areas that we haven’t been happy with the management of the staff that are there, so we have decided to put as a temporary measure, some oversight in there, to make sure they get the systems up to scratch.
“We’ve taken some of our senior staff elsewhere with expertise in sterilisation and put it into their team to look through what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, to help them get their services up to the full standard that we’d expect.”
However Dr Hames conceded if the provider was not able to improve the quality of its services, the Government would act.
“We’ve got that capacity within our contract that if they’re not providing the standard of service we require then we can take it back, and I have no hesitation in doing that if the standard doesn’t lift,” he said.
In a statement, Serco said it was committed to resolving the challenges as quickly as possible.