Re: CV and mad panic behaviour
Reply #5335 –
On a side note, regarding our 4000 bed ICU facilities, I think people are mis-representing the sheer volume of work and money that would be possible to deliver it.
I think its a bit mad to expect this to occur irrespective of what people think was promised.
Politicians tend to use qualifying statements. Funding 4000 beds is fine, but where and looking at delivering it, and actually delivering it are two different beasts.
Where are you going to get the appropriate facility that can handle the requirements from every single level of health care?
Don't get too sucked into this political hyperbole people. The ICU beds are an iceberg situation.
1. 4000 beds is enormous. I work at a 10 story hospital in the eastern suburbs that doesnt have capacity for more than 1000 TOTAL hospital beds in one building (being generous).
2. we have talked about specialised nursing already. Doctors who specialise in treatment are in as short a supply as nurses, so having a dedicated ICU facility outside of a hospital is pie in the sky stuff which will absolutely leave us with a shortage of staff to do the non covid stuff.
3. Where can this facility exist outside of our hospital network taking account the aforementioned, whilst still adequately allowing safe places for donning and doffing PPE for staff, treating patients in a clinically safe environment, with access to emergency operating theatres at a moments notice, with all the appropriate drugs on hand, and the refrigeration to house them, the cleaning facilities for people to adequately sterilise this location, as well as meal prepping facilities, storing fluids in a controlled environment where they arent subjected to wild swings in temperature as well as house all the relevant systems for health information management that are both secure, and functional for the admissions, transfer and discharge of patients with all the telephony available, as well as the support networks for staff to grab a tea or coffee safely and go to the bath room, shower etc.
Now that I have highlighted the impossible task of the above, we have patients with varying needs. Some are mental health. Some peadiatric, others will be natal, and neo natal, and then you need an entire different army of staff to come with for those areas, because as we have touched on before, this is not a one sized fits all approach.
So, any talk, of 4000 beds, its fraught with danger. You want to hang Andrews out to dry, sure, go for it, but any reliance on that, is our worst case covid scenario, and any facility that is setup to make use of 4000 "pop up" beds, if actually required means the pandemic has taken a turn for the worse, and we are going to be seeing an alarmingly high death rate.
I was privy to this new build hospital that went up and opened in october of 2014. This is one of the best facilities in the state, and it is still woefully inadequate to be a site for these 4000 beds. We only have 20 icu beds. We might be able to expand up to 31 utilising our Surgical Suites and utilising our Cardiology wards single bed rooms (we have less than 10 of those which overlap with our ICU). That might be where a good few hundred of the additional ICU capacity comes from across ALL hospitals that currently exist in the network, but flippant political hyperbole surrounding what the network can do, is not helpful to anyone and pretending that 4000 beds was promised stamped and then not delivered is most likely a massive stretch. Its also worth remembering at the time, that mikakos was still in the system, and that we were travelling down a road where the assumption was that each and every covid positive patient was going to require ECMO, and intubation.
The game has changed. The breaks we have put on this has achieved much better outcomes than people think for a wider population of people and if we end up with 4000 people in an ICU bed at one time in this state, i would hate to be covid positive in that equation.
Topic: CV and mad panic behaviour (Read 941847 times)
previous topic - next topic
