Despite opening six extra over census beds and taking six beds from the theatre recovery area, this 12 extra beds has done nothing to alleviate the bed shortage.

The new standard of two recovery beds per operating theatre, means we are five beds short (we have five theatres and five recovery beds).

This has a direct effect on the function on the theatre because we now have to wake patients up in theatre instead of the specialised recovery area. This obviously delays theatre activity and negatively impacts on our ability to service the lists causing further cancellations

This has now been further impacted by the unilateral decision of the many orthopaedic surgeons in Wollongong hospital not to look after fracture and trauma patients from the Shoalhaven.

There had been a longstanding arrangement between the two trauma hospitals in the region that when our two surgeons at Shoalhaven hospital were not on call, Wollongong hospital with its many more junior and senior orthopaedic staff would look after these patients. 

Ten days ago the Wollongong surgeons announced that this arrangement would end on March 1. This was without any discussion with our surgeons or me as Head if Department of Surgery. I was informed on February 22. 

The administration of the ILSHD was asked for clarification and their response was that we had to absorb into our already overrun hospital, all the fracture care and trauma.

This means that we will have to deal with something of the numbers of 2000 episodes of care in the last seven months that was dealt with by the much better equipped service in Wollongong. 

So our two public orthopaedic surgeons and their junior registrar were informed of this debacle.

The action of the administration in Wollongong  was to provide us with one more junior doctor and allow us to use two senior orthopaedic surgeons to be on a roster with our two surgeons to be on call each weekend and try and cover each weekday as well. This does not come with any extra theatre time , nurses, anaesthetists, wards staff, beds or radiographers. 

This new requirement of the hospital will impact on our core business and further add to the cancellations and add to the waiting lists. 

I have for years had to add services to the theatre using a cost neutral technique. That is I have had to take time from one surgical group to add another, so as to provide increased services. We currently have no more funded theatre time or skilled theatre nurses let alone hospital beds or ward staff.

A colleague said to me on Thursday the “ hospital is broken” and he is correct

We will all rally to look after all our patients, however the increase in numbers at the South Coast Correctional Centre, the two navy bases (they now have no hospitals on base) and the tsunami of economic refugees heading from Sydney and Wollongong have put our hospital system under terminal stress.

Seems some changes have been made, or are going to be made, by the federal government that would allow MP's and senators to spend their electoral allowance on radio and TV ads. The use of the allowance for political advertising in the electronic media was previously disallowed.  Does this mean this expenditure would be  reimbursed by the taxpayer as part of their election expenditure? We go around and around with the use of public money!