NSW Health Minister Ryan Park has had sleepless nights for months. The senior minister who is considered a future premier says he has been consumed with worry that disgruntled staff at the beleaguered Northern Beaches Hospital would quit their jobs en masse.
At the same time, he has sweated over the impenetrable problem of “bed block” – particularly involving elderly patients who languish for weeks or longer in wards while they wait for an aged care place.
NSW Health Minister Ryan Park in his Parliament House office on Tuesday.Credit: Edwina Pickles
Indeed, the worsening issue is fast galloping away from the minister and there are now 1100 beds across the public health system (the equivalent of two Sydney hospitals) being taken up by people who should have been discharged from hospital. Last year, that number hovered at about 750.
Park, who took on the health portfolio in opposition after the 2019 election, has one of the hardest jobs in politics, notorious for gaining prominence only when tragedies hit. The one that has rattled him the most is the death of two-year-old Joe Massa, who was treated at Northern Beaches Hospital. His death led to “Joe’s law”, which bans future public-private partnerships in hospitals.
Joe’s death prompted calls for the state government to step in and take over the Northern Beaches Hospital, which was delivered by the former Coalition government as a PPP. The deal was finally struck this week, after months of tense negotiations with private provider Healthscope.
Healthscope operated the Northern Beaches Hospital under a public private partnership (PPP).Credit: Renee Nowytarger
It was the constant worrying about workforce pressures on an already struggling health system, Park says, that forced him to work as quickly as possible to negotiate to take control of the hospital. He says the ongoing focus on the hospital meant the staff were “feeling it big time” and he feared staff would walk away from their jobs, adding more strain to the system.
“They’ve reported that staff have been abused in the local community,” Park says. “When your workplace is the focus of a lot of public attention, not always for the best reasons, it can become really challenging.
“They were feeling it big time, and I was worried, if we didn’t move as quickly as we could, then the biggest issue…was making sure there was adequate staff, and [ensuring] we didn’t lose staff to the point where service delivery and service quality and safety was impacted.”
An in-principle deal struck this week will allow the hospital’s 494 public beds to be integrated back into the public hospital system by mid-2026 after months of work to unpick one of the most complex privatisation arrangements in the state’s history.
“It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” Park says. “It’s been an enormous amount of work, a lot of meetings, a lot of deliberations. It’s a highly complex contract. This was never meant to happen to it. We didn’t go into the last election thinking we were going to need to do this.”
The Healthscope deal will cost the taxpayer $190 million, although Park is yet to land an agreement on whether all private services will be axed from the hospital. (Senior specialists have warned that a wholesale takeover by the public system would be disastrous for the community). It is also unclear what financial pressures the hospital will add to the state’s $35 billion health budget.
“We have had to, and the former government has had to, successively increase payments to Northern Beaches hospital on the way,” Park says. “That will have to be recalibrated back into the system, so we should be able to get some efficiencies in terms of what we’re doing there.
“For the first time, that hospital will now become part of an integrated network that we call Northern Sydney Local Health District, which will allow us to get some scale, some efficiencies, move people in and around.”
The minister says workforce pressures including understaffing in the state’s busiest hospitals as well as in regional and rural centres, remain one of his most pressing concerns.
“Staffing keeps me awake every night because the pressures on our health system at the moment, coming off a difficult winter period, are significant,” Park says. “We are seeing quarter-on-quarter increases in presentations.
“We now have a situation where we’ve got 1100 beds that are being used by elderly people who have finished their treatment and NDIS participants who are not getting support, so they’re stuck. What that means in an acute hospital setting is reduction in beds for people needing acute services, and that’s what keeps me up at night.”
Park says the Commonwealth must step up and better manage and fund aged care and the NDIS, both of which are adding stress to the NSW health system.
“I don’t like fighting as a general rule, nor do I just like pointing the finger. That’s not me. It never has been me but, but this is an issue I need help with.”
The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.
Most Viewed in Politics
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
