Is it really 'Unacceptable' or 'Acceptable' - you decide

It is not the birthing woman that is the problem, as this would have to have been a preterm birth for these arrangements to be made at all, probably before 35 weeks and it’s the Neonatal Intensive Care bed for the baby that are the issue here. Thats what NSW ran out of, and it happens both ways. NICU’s are full to bursting with pretermers but thats another discussion. A woman in imminent need of neonatal support for her impending baby is sent whereever the neonatal bed is available, to give birth there, its commonsense really.

My youngest daughter has a condition that requires regular hospital visits, to the point where we don’t mind where the hospital is. Sometimes, it is Woden Valley, other times, it is Sydney. We just do the miles for her.

I do feel sorry for somebody who had a bad time because they were moved from Sydney to Canberra. But more importantly, I am sadened by the hospital staff who provided the impression that beds would be available. Perhaps all we need to do is to take a national approackh, and let everybody know that the system will provide services where the capacity is available.

We have to be carefull to ensure that if services are provided ‘out of area’, that we don’t financially burden the family.

As Australian’s, we often forget that we are very lucky that we have a health system. Many others around the planet don’t have such ‘rights’.

We live in one country, and have a Federal Government, and I think we should not have seperate health systems (let alone education systems).

If we want to be seperate states, I say – “Bring back the customs boths on the borders…”

the Canberra Hospital had one of their radiation machines blow up a couple of months ago so that threw out all their timings no end and saw people being moved to Sydney for further treatment

I’d like to know why we don’t just have a single national health and hospital system, to do away with the need for the administrative overhead of billing each other.

It is the fact that there is a need for reciprocal arrangements for fairly basic and forseable medical needs that worries me.(Twins are not that unusual.) The medical system is stretched very thin and getting worse if a whole state can’t cope with one birth.

More federal funding for hospitals sees reduced state funding as sure as night follows day, the historical graphs are unmistakable.

Hospital spending is the minimum that the States can get away with while getting a minimum of bad headlines.

But in ANY event 90% of health funding goes on the last 6 months of life.

So there’s plenty more money could be spend on pregnancy if it was a real problem.

Was a Canberra patient turned away? No.

Would you like a Sydney hospital to take you if it’s needed?

Certainly if you’ve got bad burns you’d be glad of this reciprocal arrangements, plus I understand the health services do bill each other for these transfers.

I think it is unacceptable. If hte whole of NSW can’t look after one pregnant lady (where they have some idea in advance that she will be giving birth soon), then how would they ever cope with an actual emergecy – like a bus crash or something. Or what if 5 pregnant women had had emergencies that night? I wish Howard had spent the surplus on health, not pointless tax cuts.

I don’t about the pregnancy issue, but TCH has an excellent oncology unit, dealing with chemo and radio. I’m not aware of issues there. My wife underwent treatment for bowel cancer there several years ago.