WA’s peak medical body has weighed in on recent criticism of Fiona Stanley Hospital, labelling its latest medical bungle involving an elderly patient as “embarrassing” and calling on the state government to invest in improving services at the beleaguered hospital.
On November 23, a man in his 70s with acute renal failure was moved from a hospital ward into a make-shift bed in a physiotherapy gym to cope with overcrowding.
The patient’s friend, who visited him in the hospital, alleged that he was left in the gym for eight hours with a bell to ring if he needed assistance, but said when he rang the bell, nobody came.
But a Department of Health spokeswoman says the patient, who was located adjacent to the ward and near to a staff base, received the same level of care as those in a ward environment, including regular monitoring.
“The bed in the overflow area is a normal hospital bed, the same as provided in the wards throughout the hospital,” she said.
Australian Medical Association president Michael Gannon told Radio 6PR on Monday the decision to move the man “beggars belief”.
“Someone’s made a judgement that if you’re one or two patients over [in a ward] you find a crease or crevice because you can’t open a whole new ward,” he said.
“If you open a whole new ward you’ve got to staff that with the minimum number of staff.”
“In the context of a hospital administration that’s getting ready to cut hundreds of jobs it really beggars belief.”
Dr Gannon stopped short of joining opposition spokesman Roger Cook in calling for health minister Kim Hames’ resignation over the bungle, instead saying this was his chance to make things right.
“We’ve got a system that’s bursting at the seams and we’ve got a government, like so many governments around the world, that seem to regard health as a cost rather than an investment,” he said.
“This is not good enough, this is bronze service or worse and I think the minister needs to take his share of the responsibility.”
On Sunday, Mr Cook said he was “gobsmacked” when he heard an elderly man had been left in the hospital’s gym.
“I’ve heard of corridor care but I’ve never heard of gym care,” he said.
“It’s extraordinary that you could spend $2 billion on a world-class hospital, the jewel in the crown of WA health, then be moving patients into the gym and pulling a curtain around them.
“This isn’t the standard of care we expect in a state like WA.”
Mr Cook said the state needed a dedicated health minister, not one also responsible for the tourism portfolio.
“What will it take for the Premier to act?” he said.
Dr Hames responded that the situation had arisen when a surge in patients had led to a need to transfer the overflow to Fremantle Hospital, but this had not occurred quickly enough.
He understood it was the first time such an incident had occurred but even once was not appropriate or satisfactory.
“Clearly it’s not an adequate situation,” he said.
He dismissed the call for his head, saying his tourism portfolio responsibilities occurred at largely different times to his health duties, and added that it was unreasonable to expect that nothing would ever go wrong in a health system looking after millions of patients.
He was, however, “not very happy” about the news and he expected to be making further contact with the patient about the matter.
The news comes days after a parliamentary committee handed down the findings from the latest investigation into the beleaguered new hospital, stating patients had been put at risk since it opened in October 2014.
Hailed as the state’s biggest ever health infrastructure project, Fiona Stanley Hospital has encountered scandal after scandal, including non-government service provider Serco failing to sterilise surgical instruments, floods in the emergency department, failures in phone coverage and digital records systems, cleaning and linen systems failures and problems with staff training levels resulting in the need to employ more staff at a cost of millions.
Failures reported in patient care have included patients given the wrong medicine, or wrong doses of the right medicine, or even epidural drugs being injected into veins; patients being injured in falls; a woman needing an emergency caesarean section because medical staff had not managed the falling heartbeat in one of her twins; patients left lying in dirty beds and given the wrong food or no food at all.
A coronial inquiry is due to begin soon over the death of Jared Olsen, 41, who was given the wrong medicine while being treated for inflammatory bowel disease, and died less than a month later.