16th August 2007

Hospitals.

We read about it every day, hospitals on "red alert", with overcrowding, no spare beds and staff shortages.
Christchurch General has over the last 10 years rebuilt a large percentage of it's footprint. A new womens hospital has just been completed replacing one on another site, yet it is unable to cope with the number of births with new mothers being sent home or to other satellite facilities within hours of birth.

Forecast population growth figures show that in the next 15-20 years, Christchurch will have several hundred thousand people more than it has today. If a new facility cannot cope on day one, how on earth is it expected to cope with future growth? Who is responsible for the planning and why is sufficient money not made available to build something which has excess space initially, which can be phased in when required? It surely is cheaper when erecting a building shell to construct more spaces than you initially require, but not fit them out than try to tack them on at a later stage.

It's time to stop hospitals being run by committees of well meaning bumblers. The Government (whichever it is) should take back ownership and appoint a think tank of experts to redesign an entirely new hospital system without preconceptions. It might take a generation to implement it, but anything has to be better than the chaos that can be expected from continuing down the same path as we are now.

Shelter, food on our table and our health are the three most essential ingredients of life. If we don't have our health, we have nothing. We have only a short time in this world and in this enlightened age, the health of the population should be more important than world cups, yachting races and all the other non essentials that governments always seem to have money to splash around to pay for.

Governments complain that they already pour more and more money into the system. By taking a "hands off" approach, they are unable to control a lot of the wasteful bureaucracies that have established themselves which is why the present system must be dismantled and put back together with new objectives and forward planning in mind. Start with the four main cities or even just one of them, fine tune the process and then roll it out to the rest of the country.

TC