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Your views: on a public hospital crisis

Today, readers comment on swamped emergency departments, and why media bias is in the eye of the beholder.

May 11, 2022, updated May 11, 2022

Commenting on the story: ‘Bandaid solution’: Lyell McEwin Hospital ‘fix’ under fire

The ambulance and nurses unions have made no complaints since Labor was elected with all the promises to fix ramping and emergency departments.

I fear for old age safety when we need an ambulance or in case of emergency. With no one complaining, including the media, things will only get worse. Out of sight, out of mind is a true saying. – Larry Cavallaro

Just more rubbish promises by government. Neither side of government fixes the health system despite endless promises, and they haven’t in the 40 years I have been a doctor. Labor are just better at marketing the promises they can’t or don’t keep. – Dr John Meegan

Serious failures of patient care are often irrationally politicised. The new seven-week old Government cannot be blamed for this failure at the Lyell McEwin Hospital.

Rather, these flaws in the system are structural problems overseen by a cumbersome and inefficient health bureaucracy, stretching from hospital administrations up to the higher levels of the health department.

This is symbolised by the fatuous comment from a hospital spokesperson that the current episode was ‘not a substantial stuff-up’ when clearly it was. This was followed within 12 hours by the announcement that the problem of external triaging was solved. This also seems unlikely while the emergency department is chronically overrun.

These entrenched structural flaws in the system are mostly refractory to ministerial control and political intervention. Let’s hope the new Government can do better. – Warren Jones

So the previous Labor Government in power for 16 years builds a new Royal Adelaide Hospital, the same size as the old one, all with “private” rooms. What a short-sighted, monument-building waste-of-money exercise that was.

Now you have a genuine crisis on your hands, brought about by the Covid pandemic, which is not going away anytime soon. The health unions played politics and  hounded the Marshall Government out of office with all sorts of claims of inaction, shortcomings and failures. The Marshall Government appeared paralysed with fear of standing up to the health system and opted for the softly-softly approach and/or was overwhelmed by the enormity of the task in front of it.

Congratulations, your campaign was successful, you (ALP) are now back in power and quite rightly now have to deal with the consequences of your lack of foresight and planning when designing the new RAH. Instead of coming up with a functional, cost-effective facility that could be adapted to meet the unforeseen, you ignored – courtesy of Transforming Health (you certainly transformed it!) – the health needs outside of the CBD and your answer is to put patients on plastic chairs in the outdoors going into winter.

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We treat animals better than this.

It is high time that someone looked at the efficiency of our health system, which has a lot of very highly paid people running around in it, and started asking some hard questions about where this is all going, because what we are being served up at the moment is unacceptable. – Grant Petras

Commenting on the opinion piece: News Corp plays to type with election coverage

I tend to agree with you that Sky News is pro-Liberal in many ways, but it also has many current and ex-Labor politicians that give their views also.

This is more than what could be said about the taxpayer-funded ABC, which is so far left they are falling off a cliff and their news and current affair programs have no equality at all with the discussions on politics. – Bruce Hambour

Because I watch as much as I can bear of Sky News After Dark (even though my family tell me not to – I reply that it keeps me activated), I know how accurate this article is and how few Australians of moderate persuasion are aware of the climate denialism, pro-Trumpism, anti-science distortions and narrow world views on Murdoch’s Dark channel.

It is different in the day, with journalists who are mostly doing their job professionally. – Julanne Sweeney

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