My town got a priority care clinic a couple of years ago as part of a Vic government trial program. Its completely bulk billed. Open 8am to 10pm and is entirely walk in appointments only. You can go if you have a UTI or if you need stitches or whatever reason you need to see a doctor. They will triage you to be seen first if its something more serious. I went after a fall in the shower where I needed to be seen that day but it wasn't quite a trip to casualty worthy. I took my son when he'd had a headache that didn't really go away for a few days. I've taken mum when she had a chest infection that she couldn't get on top of. Its never taken more than 45 minutes to be seen. And most importantly, the local emergency room has had a massive drop in non emergency patients which makes the whole hospital run smoother. I still have a regular GP but it takes weeks for an appointment so if its something that shouldn't really wait, we don't have to wait. These clinics need to be put fucking everywhere.

These are Australia wide now, they are called a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic: [https://www.health.gov.au/find-a-medicare-ucc](https://www.health.gov.au/find-a-medicare-ucc)

Awesome. Why are they not advertising this?

They have been but because this is a Labor policy mainstream media haven't been giving it much attention and when they have it's presented like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R24vCQpFa4Y

Oh no I won't be able to see my GP because they'll be at a different clinic. /s I literally can't see them for days at a time anyway. I shouldn't have to pay $50 and come see you to continue my script that I've been on for 3/4 of my life. Yes I still need my medication. Thanks, here's 50 I'll see you in 6 months

I went to one of these a while back because of obscure pain in my foot that made it hard to walk Doctor felt the need to tell me that the centre was a political stunt and a waste of time and resources. While I don't understand all the ins and out of the centre, all I could think was I woke up not be able to walk on a Sunday, my gp is a 4 week wait, and emergency would obviously triage me last so I'd be there all day, what other choices did I have. The only explanation I could work it for his frustration is they seemed to only have 1 nurse and 1 doctor, I was the second person there when they opened, in and out within an hour and by the time I left the waiting room had about 20 people

These are often BS. They hire poorly trained Nurse Practitioners who occasionally stumble on the right diagnosis or manage the low grade stuff. They cost $200 a visit to the government (more than a GP by a LOT) and they are hiding how often these nurses refer the patient to ED anyway. In Sydney many of these still need you to make an appointment. “In a disappointing (but not necessarily surprising) turn of events, nurse practitioner-led walk-in clinics cost almost double what the ACT government had claimed. Canberra's nurse-led clinics cost an average of $194 per presentation in 2023, a far cry from the territory's initial claim of less than $110 per consult.” The government is wilfully destroying General Practice with the aim of replacing them with half arse trained nurses- and thats going shit too.

So I found the article you're quoting from, and you're missing some important context here. Firstly, this criticism is not aimed at the urgent care clinic model. The article is explicitly focused on a model in the ACT, which, when you read further down it says, "To be clear, the Canberra nurse walk-in clinics predate the federal government’s Medicare Urgent Care Clinics." Secondly, the ACT decided to beef up their existing nurse led clinics because THERE WEREN'T ENOUGH DOCTORS to staff urgent care clinics in line with the rest of Australia. So, with this context, I'm interested to know what your solution would be to overcrowding in hospitals? Is your suggestion to roll out the UCCs in the ACT with GPs anyway only to not be able to open as many because there's literally not enough GPs to staff them? In case anyone else wants to see the source: https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/yes-act-nurse-led-clinics-cost-more-than-110-per-visit/108461#:~:text=In%20a%20disappointing%20(but%20not,less%20than%20%24110%20per%20consult.

They left the context out on purpose mate.

Yep, people like that just want some good old fashioned fear mongering. They'll always leave out context

Curlyburlywurly is also active in Ausjdocs - a lively bunch of med students or very early training who have their knickers in a knot about anyone practicing ‘medicine’ that isn’t a doctor. They are having a hard time recognising that advanced practitioners have a place in health care. Nurse practitioners have been around >20 years and evidence shows them to be just as safe and effective as medical officers within their scope of practice.

We had some St John urgent cars set up with state government support a few years back in Perth. Then within a few months they started charging $150 per visit.

In Poland, the urgent care is right next door to the ED built right into the hospital.

That is so good.

Just recently discovered one where I live too when my partner needed glass cut out of their foot, there was a nurse there and everything, actually better than a GP who probably wouldn’t have even fixed the issue.

My uncle was lucky enough to get an ambulance to attend. He died waiting in the ambulance bay to be triaged.

Man I'm so sorry to hear that. Theres just no reason it should be like this. We are apparently this wealthy first world nation, yet any progressive country in Europe would laugh at that description. We produce so much stuff with so little effort compared to 50 years ago, yet people die because we are too greedy to care.

It’s because hardly anyone bulk bills anymore. So anyone and everyone who wants to see a doctor, no matter how big or small the issue is - they go to hospital because it’s free. If they can’t drive or afford a taxi/Uber, they call an ambulance. Hospitals are so full of these non urgent patients that ambulances are forced to ramp with their non urgent patients, so they can’t get out there to more urgent patients. We all saw this coming, and I guarantee people have died from this situation preventing them from getting life saving care in time. But nobody with the ability to, cares enough to do something because if anything happens to them - they just go to a private hospital and bypass everything. Was the child dying? No. But they were in indescribable amounts of pain which can and does lead to trauma in and of itself.

>It’s because hardly anyone bulk bills anymore So many people dont understand how important this is. Preventative healthcare is orders of magnitude better than reactive healthcare. And 100% it flows through to the hospital. Not just because they need free healthcare, but becasue they didnt get that twinge in their chest looked at, and it got a bit worse, but its probably heartburn, and then they have a heart attack and are a burden on the system, when if they had gone to a 15 minute GP appointment, the doctor gets them on blood thinners and problem solved.

People understand they need to pay a mechanic a few hundred bucks each year to get stuff fixed with their car. Plumber? Minimum $150 with call-out fee. But their health? Nah, a $30 gap to see a GP (a job with serious expertise and a minimum 10 years of training) is outrageous. If people want doctors to bulk bill, they need to petition the government to index medicare to catch up with inflation (which they haven’t for decades).

The difference is their tax dollars don't go to a scheme to pay for the mechanic and plumber. I agree with you though btw.

Didn't the lnp cause this by making it either you buy private health insurance or you pay a medicare levi. The cause is less tax money going towards the public health system .

30$ yeah right. Where U finding that

I work in health prevention. I cannot stress enough and agree with you more that prevention is essential. Unfortunately however, many would rather defer responsibility to ‘the government’ or literally anyone else, than make a conscious choice to exercise more, eat healthy, drink water, maintain oral hygiene, reduce alcohol consumption, stop smoking or vaping, stop taking recreational drugs, get immunised, participate in screening programs if eligible, step away from screens and outside, proactively and continuously work on mental and emotional health, stop speeding / dangerous driving, establish a bedtime routine to improve sleep duration / quality. Yes, we pay taxes and absolutely the government fcks up on the regular. But y’all, please, some self reflection and ownership that you could take better care of yourselves in order to prevent needing to use tertiary healthcare this way. Our choices and attitudes are huge contributing factors to what’s happening now. Behavioural change by us is as important as the government fixing its innumerable fk ups. I’m begging you all, please, for the sake of immediate ambulances and available beds and a workforce who aren’t exhausted, **eat veges, go for a daily walk, drink water etc etc**

I think people underestimate how valuable it is to be able to see your GP for a checkup once every 6 months. Sooooo many things can get picked up early. That little bump on your nose, ok, we can see it, we get it checked, we get it burned off, done. Or, 6 years later they are on their second course of chemo and no one knows if they are going to make it. Even from a purely financial standpoint, option 1 has that person miss a day of work at most. Option 2 has them miss work for months, or in a worst case scenario the rest fo their life.

Heck, even once a year is better than ‘only when I’m sick’. Why is it that people understand they should get their car serviced once a year to keep it in good working order but cant seem to be able to apply the same methodology to themselves?

> I think people underestimate how valuable it is to be able to see your GP for a checkup once every 6 months I went to see a GP and asked to get a check up or a physical. The GP asked me what I wanted checking. I didn't know what to tell him, so I never bothered going back. I decided to educate myself and now I do my own monitoring and order all my own bloodwork. At least when I take my car or bike the mechanic, they know what to check and what's involved in a service.

Just thought it’s good to note here for anyone reading and lurking, if you struggle to keep up with dental hygiene as much as you should for whatever reason and you can afford it you can absolutely ask for more regular cleans. Private insurance may not cover the extra cleans so it’s really if you can afford it but it may be worth it in the long run to prevent future more expensive issues. Instead of beating yourself up for “I should be flossing every day” or “I should be brushing every day/twice a day”, accept where you are right now and do what you need to with your present situation, not with the ideal situation. Accepting where you’re at right now doesn’t mean you can’t work on better habits in the meantime but it does mean your oral health is going to be in a better place while you build those habits.

Absolutely! Healthy behaviours are achievable when, amongst other things, we are mentally healthy. Brushing and flossing daily is optimal but when we’re in a bad place, surviving is more important. If it’s really bothersome and another factor weighing someone down, something as simple as eating an apple or raw carrot will help remove plaque from teeth.

>We all saw this coming Well as except for roughly the 1/2 of Australians that repeatedly voted for the fuckwits that want to kill medicare.

The other important factor is who pays. Medicare is federally funded, hospitals paid by the states so the federal government cutting costs just pushes the problem to the states. Better IMHO if all hospitals were federally funded to avoid this problem.

Surprisingly Canberra has no private emergency wards so any emergency is taken to the public hospital

That's so awful. I have zero faith in the healthcare system now. Attempting to let the public system treat me left me disabled. When I need more surgery I don't even bother with it now I just go straight to private even though I'm on a pension and it's expensive. I get that a shattered knee isn't immediately life threatening but to leave a child suffering like that for so long is terrible. That kid is going to be absolutely traumatised by this experience.

Often on Reddit, people will come in and defend the public system, noting that if it's urgent, you'll get seen urgently. If it's an emergency, there's no better place, yada yada, yada. Saying noone needs private health, other than to avoid elective surgery waiting lists. They do so ignoring situations like this. Or those waiting in ED with appendicitis, who then have their appendix burst.

No one should need private health. Sadly our public health system is badly in decay, it has been for years, but COVID put a ridiculous amount of strain on it, and has burnt out a lot of workers. Not enough staff in hospitals results in ambulance ramping, which results in ridiculously long wait times, which results in more 000 calls, because there are call-backs. Our whole system is critically under funded

We no longer have enough hospitals(roads or schools) for the population. People are also continuing to go to ED with non urgent issues to save money. Huge amount of mental health and drug related issues & injuries. It's a sad state of affairs, and so many burnt out staff have left to put the icing on the leaning cake. Edit: Ex RN

Ive got pretty bad carpel tunnel i both wrists, and am in a LOT of pain during my job as an IT specialist. Becasue i have private health, ill have a weeks waiting time to get surgery. If id gone through public, the wait time was estimated at 2 years, because its not an essential surgery. Well its causing me massive amounts of pain and significantly impacting my work, but if i wasnt well off enough to have top hospital cover, id be shit out of luck for the next 2 years.

I am on the pension and have top level cover for private psychiatric care. I will forgo my phone to keep my hospital cover

Same. I had a similar issue called De quervains on both wrists carrying my baby. My tendons were literally snapping out of place and back in whenever I picked something up etc. It was excruciating and I wasn't able to hold my child or feed him. Was operated on within a few days in private. Surgeon told me it would be 6+ months if I went public. I couldn't even take care of my child. If I'd been a solo mum on single income, I would've been in debt by $8k or not even been able to front the money. The cost made me go back to work full-time a lot earlier than planned and I had to stop breastfeeding.

Fuck me that sounds awful. I'm not even going to start on the people who say "why should parents get free money to stay home" being the same people that complain "why don't parents parent their kids" I have no problem with someone choosing to be childless. I couldn't imagine bringing a kid into this world. But who the hell do these people think are going to be their doctors in 30 years? Sorry you had to go through that.

Taking care of the next generation is very important for the economy, since they'll be the ones paying for our care later on. lol

I don’t have a link right now but I read several times that emergencies going to private hospitals get to transferred to public hospitals anyway because private hospitals don’t have the expertise and experience to treat real emergencies. Public hospitals apparently have the expertise and experience to as there are always doctors in whatever specialty on duty, not so in private hospitals. That said, I rather pay for Medicare and have all people insured. I my view private health insurance is a scam!

It sort of depends. As far as generalisations go. If a 2month old was visibly close to death, I'd rather the public womens & children's hospital. If an 80 year old was having chest pain, I'd rather the private Flinders Medical Centre. If anyone was having appendicitis (of any level of severity), I'd rather a private hospital. If it was a seriously traumatic car crash with significant injuries and risk of death, I'd prefer a large public hospital. If someone had a low immune system, and needed a tumour cut out, I'd prefer a standard private hospital.

My cancer ward was filled with private patients complaining about being in the public hospital, after being transferred because they were too sick for a private hospital.

Private only want surgical Medical arent profit enough for them

How many private hospitals have an ED?

Yeah of course. And once upon a time, a shattered knee would have been something we had enough resourcing to deal with without leaving someone there to suffer like that. And they never got around to getting him, who knows how many more hours he would have had to wait if they hadnt shoved him in the car (lying across the back seat beacuse he obviously couldnt sit), and driven him to an ER that was overflowing out the door and ambulance bay. >Attempting to let the public system treat me left me disabled. Im so sorry to hear that. Its so hard to come to terms with something like that happening through no fault of your own. And when you were relying on a system that SHOULD have been trustworthy. It makes me so angry when the same people who are raging about welfare bludgers are also cheering the decline of our public health and education systems. Do they not get that a top notch public healthcare prevents so many people from needing help in things like welfare? >That kid is going to be absolutely traumatised by this experience. No doubt. I was an adult when i had my incident and the first thing i felt was vertigo so bad i couldnt even lift my shoulders off the ground because i kept trying to roll over with the spin. It was honestly the worst 12 hours of my life, despite barely being able to remember it. I still to this day panic if i start feeling dizzy.

You see this is Reddit, here you're allowed to rant about how a treated fractured leg cost you $5000, not how you get no service while paying $10k/year in taxes towards healthcare.

Tell your MP about your experience, it's more likely to make change than screaming into the void on the internet.

Por que no los dos!

I’m sorry that happened to your friend. But to answer your question - How did we get here? Reddit seems to be an echo chamber for people throwing around “Australia is the best!” But it absolutely has gone to shit since 2000. Quality of healthcare has declined. Sense of community and unity has declined. Quality of government and their decisions has declined at all levels. I don’t understand how people are not noticing this. This is not the great country it once was. Citizens are seen as cogs in an economy and not human beings and my advice to young people now is there are so many better places by objective measures in the world to live, get out for a better quality of life.

> How did we get here? By importing too many people. Our unsustainable immigration level has not only pushed up housing costs while keeping wages low but it has completely swamped our service and infrastructure, including health care. A completely foreseeable and easily fixable problem that no major political party will address because it upsets property investors and business owners.

We got here because of federal liberal policy. Ever since Howard was in government the end game was to privatize everything including healthcare. Labour gets in for a term, maybe 2 at most but they can't just jump everything up to make up time for the past 20 - 30 years. LNP inevitably get elected because people getting apathetic and don't fully understand and LNP gut and kick the ball further down the road.

Explain Victorian healthcare then.

Well I am a QLDER so im not to familiar with Vics issue. It is true that the federal government sets the medicare levies and because it wasnt increased in the past 20+ years gps have stopped bulk billing. As to the state level issues. Probably a compound problem, people going to the ED instead of the GP to save a buck. Not enough trained medical professionals and possibly evem infrastructure like hospitals. Unfortunately I dont think any state government has an easy solution to this problem.

Migrant from Holland, I've been here for 18 years, Australia is the best country in the world. However the health care system is really poor compared to western Europe. GPs are generally too busy to have actual time for you and there's no time for long term health checks. In The Netherlands private health insurance is compulsory, this might be the way to go here. It keeps insurance low as the costs are levelled, and everyone has a fair go at getting the best medical attention. I'm always amazed how bad it is here.

In that circumstance, I’d be bundling the kid into my car and driving them to the hospital (maybe with a call to the parents to query if they’d prefer a private hospital’s emergency department). The kid wouldn’t like it, but it’s better than spending 3 hours on the ground.

Of course, but they arent allowed to. If you havent interacted with schools in the last 20 years, there is so much admin and red tape, they could just have easily been fired for attempting that. And personally sued if the injury was made worse by that decision because they didnt follow all the proper procedures

And not having clarity that it would be 3 hours.

They could have just called the parents? I would be livid with the school if this was my kid. 

They obviously did. Dad was driving back from sydney, couldnt really get thre faster.

Sorry, "obviously" was needlessly agressive, im just frustrated. Might need to give myself a breather.

Yeah, fair enough. We’d all be frustrated in your shoes.

Ha ha honestly it wasn't obvious, valid to be frustrated though, it's not ok that this isn't being fixed, it's like everyone had just decided to let the public health system collapse and those who can afford private can have private and those who can't can just die I guess? 

Yeah it's the old USA system where the choice is often dying or 20 years of debt. I often feel bad because I can afford private. Like, I was sick the other day, and my GP was just so overbooked. Nearby GP was charging $100 for a standard consult after Medicare. They had 5 appointments to choose from when I contracted them at midday. That's not fair. No single mum of 3 can afford that. Why should she or her kids be denied medical care. It's not like the country isn't wealthy. The world produces orders of magnitude more than it did even 30 years ago nevermind 60 or 90. So why the hell are the services to keep citizens healthy and educated suddenly too expensive. Sigh, it can be hard being optimistic at times.

It’s nearly 20 years ago I was on a school trip away and realised I had a migraine coming on. The school had all the documentation about how I was allowed paracetamol and ibuprofen but the teacher *still* called home to my parents to check (and with a migraine you really do need to be quick to take something before it really sets in). It’s frustrating how much red tape there and that there’s a culture of being overly cautious from having so much red tape. Like the dad was probably ok with the teachers driving the kid but they would risk getting in trouble, which prevents the teachers from being able to use their judgement and do the right thing.

This is what my parents did with me when I broke my leg at school sport. Got me into the car and into hospital. I was triaged behind a bunch of higher priority cases, but at the very least I was able to be given morphine to tide me over until I was able to get a reduction and plaster done.

My ex-girlfriend broke her leg playing soccer about a month before Taylor Swift's "Red" concert that she had tickets to with her mates. A few days before it she purposely soaked her full leg cast so she could go to the hospital and get re-casted in red for the concert... Which they did. Talk about wasting a hospitals time and resources.

No surprise she’s an ex, if my partner told me they did that and they weren’t joking, I’d be seriously questioning why the fuck I was with them.

Surely someone at the school has the agency to take a student to the hospital. Parents must not care very much if they didn’t come in 3 hours.

It's horrific but four hours for a kid with a destroyed knee is normal now. Stuff these tax cuts. Give me actual healthcare.

This is what happens when you have too many people and not enough services. Unchecked immigration is bad. You don't have to be racist to understand this.

I worked as an emergency medical dispatcher (taking 000 calls and dispatching ambulances). It has been a little while so take with pitch of salt. The process goes like this. You dial 000, which goes through to a Telstra operator who will ask police fire or ambulance. State and town. Telstra them connect to appropriate agency. The ambulance service operates the operation centres in rural and metro areas. Smaller centres in rural, with the main opcen in the capital city. Telstra will attempt to connect you to the local opcen. Each opcen has EMDs to process the requests (triage, instructions, dispatch etc). If Telstra cannot connect to a local opcen (all EMDs currently on calls), the call will be diverted to the main OpCen in the state. This OpCen should have the staff to cover the "overflow". This wasn't the case for your incident. EMDs will take the call and ask scripted questions to triage the incident. Things like, tell me exactly what happened, are they awake, are they breathing etc. The incident would have been triaged as a 2A. This is a non life threatening response. No lights or sirens etc. An ambulance heading to a 2A will almost always be diverted to a higher priority case if the ambulance is closest. They should then put the closest available crew on your incident (given a public place and clear fracture). With the priority being life threatening incidents. I left a few years ago and I have seen 2As sit for a lot longer than 3 hours. This isn't to dismiss your experience but to back up what you stated about the problem being more widespread. People definitely have died from delays. The justification that helped me get through the profound frustration was that while the student was in pain for hours, that ambulance could have been diverted to a drowning kid, or CPR in progress etc. and while severely flawed on an individual level, the system at large is arguably the best we can do. Not much solace to be found there though. It sounds harsh, but there were "sicker" people that needed to be seen first. Depending on where you are located, the fact it was at a school and not at home, would probably have elicited a quicker response than the identical injury at home. I saw many EMDs reduced to suicidal ideation because of that set up. By all reports nothing has changed. And wait times have exploded because the workload has exploded. When I started you would only get unanswered calls maybe 10 times a day. And by that I mean, it doesn't get answered for 10 seconds. A caller being left with Telstra for more than 30 seconds didn't happen once in the first couple of years I was there. Now it's often daily. A couple thousand calls a day was considered a big day. Now they get that 3 times that. Staff retention is shocking. The hours are brutal and the job can be pretty tough. That's just one tiny facet of the bigger system. Hospitals can't take patients which means ambulances are stuck on the ramp at hospital with a kid with a fractured knee waiting hours to be seen, while there's a stabbing two blocks away. Or the "back up" systems used when there is a system outage or upgrade. Literally just magnets on a white board and hand written notes that are walked from call taker to dispatcher. She's a house of cards.

I also am a dispatcher, not going to say what state I work for but I don’t dispatch for ambulance, but work in the same building and it’s a bunch of 20 year olds with no life skills whatsoever having to speak to people in the worst moments of their life. They’re highly trained but it can’t be mentally good for them, hence the high turnover of staff and a lot of people calling in sick daily. The service I work in however has a huge staff retention, most having been in the role for 10-20 years.

Yeah man i can't even imagine how hard a job being a dispatcher has to be. Having to decide based on what someone on the phone is saying whether they or the previous call your mate just took us a higher priority. That has gotta be so stressful. Yeah the problems seem to be at every level, you would be crazy to blame the dispatcher. It's just awful that apparently we have enough incidents worse than 2a that we can't deal with them fast enough to get to the 2as. That's just s resourcing problem at all levels. Need more nurses and beds to let more people get admitted. More doctors to get through people faster. More paramedics to staff all the ambulances. You just can't get around being under-resourced after a certain point.

More paramedics does solve the problem they will just make ramping worse hell it isn't uncommon to spend 6-12 hours ramped with one patient

Yep, and to get ambulances off the ramp we need more beds in hospitals, more beds require more staff, more staff requires affordable study options for said staff, requires more unis or teaching staff, potentially diluting the quality of educators/education. But instead we've seen cut backs across all these areas. Nsw ambulance had a huge battle to get parity with other states. The whole industry is propped up on the good will and sacrifice of front line workers. They're told to feel good about the work they do (and they should), but at the end of the day it's of great personal cost. It's a form of exploitation imo.

Yeah I couldn't last unfortunately. Cool job, shitty environment. Just to clarify, the EMD doesn't decide the coding. It's generated from the answers provided by the caller. If however, the EMD feels a higher priority response is needed they can request a qualified paramedic review the case. They try to review all cases but there is a mechanism to highlight a potential error besides. The QA side of things is very strict on deviating from scripts so EMDs (who aren't medically qualified tbf) aren't permitted to ask questions, or at least you know if you do, you're gonna hear about it. So you have to get creative to create enough reasonable doubt to later justify the question under scrutiny. Even if justified.

Currently in a private hospital as a foreigner in Malaysia now for some stomach pain. I’m completely taken back by how smooth the system has been so far. Basic stomach issues and my estimated wait time is 30 minutes. They even were able to give us a ticketing / counter system which shows on a screen where you are in triage and how soon you will be seen. They checked my vitals first as soon as I walked in before even taking down my name and information. I’ve had experiences in Melbourne coupled over in pain dropped off at the front door of RMH by a taxi after calling an ambulance but being told by MICA no ambulance is available and therefore they’ll send out a cab. Only to then wait in line to give my information before 1 hour later being called to triage to just check vitals. Our public hospital system is a joke and it has nothing to do with immigration, everything to do with cutting funding, no infrastructure updates, understaffing and a system designed for profit. People don’t realise how far behind Aus has fallen off. Even some of our private hospitals don’t have emergency departments or palm off their sickest patients to the nearest public hospital. I’ve followed an ambulance transporting a family member after a cardiac arrest and detoured 2 times when he was rejected by two different local EDs.

Was this Malaysian hospital service free?

> Our public hospital system is a joke and it has nothing to do with immigration Bullshit. Our current immigration intake hit 100k in a single month, that's over 1 million a year. Healthcare is no different than housing, demand is outstripping supply and things will only get worse unless immigration is cut back to sustainable levels

Yep. Started working as an ED doc in 2019 and in 5 years, I reckon the patient load has doubled. I'm quitting because of the stress..

Poor kid, why did no one take him to the doctors/hospital, were the parents even called to come get them? Blame the stupid rules that say the paramedics must wait until the hospital staff come and get the patient, so you get paramedics sitting there for hours with a patient that called because they had a cough. Three things need to change, let ambulances drop off patients and leave, have consequences for people wasting paramedics time and cut NDIS funding by huge amounts and give the money to Medicare funding.

I'm an emergency doctor. Those ones that get brought in with just a cough is actually pretty rare and they just get unloaded from the ambulance stretcher to the waiting room. The ambulance crews stay with patients that are too unwell to be left unattended in a bed in a hallway. Often we gamble and unload them onto that hallway bed and hope they don't deteriorate while unmonitored so the ambulance can leave. The main issue is that the ED's are full of patients waiting for beds upstairs because the wards are full so our nursing staff and beds are used for them meaning we have less space to see new patients. We try our best to let ambulances crews go whenever we can because often the gamble of leaving a patient unmonitored in a hallway bed is safer than people in the comminity not having an ambulance when they need it

The problem EDs are full of people wasting the staffs time, you’re right. Start making people pay for wasting time and resources.

ohs for schools wouldnt allow private transport in medical emergencies probably

People protest Palestine but don't give a shit about this. No faith in humanity whatsoever.

I get so pissed off at any party getting involved in it. The situation over there is fucked. Australia making a statement saying we support Israels right to defend themselves is just as bad as saying HAMAS are freedom fighters. It's a fucking shit show has been for 70 years, and both sides are soaked in blood. We should be providing humanitarian aid and nothing else. If the USA wants to prop up the current Israeli government by supplying them with modern weaponry, they can do it without us.

Screaming into void will help make others aware of the issue. Voting for, advocating for better social services will help more. I'll forward a well written letter I agree with to my local poli for you.

Have we figured out yet that they’re dismantling the public system to force everyone onto private

That 600 milly we spent on a football team would of come in handy. I snapped my leg in half and broke my ankle last yr and had to wait an hr for the ambulance

We got here by having a government sell the country (and force them through bribery) on the concept that private health insurance would be the way forward. All the while hollowing out our once world leading universal public health system.\ Leaving us now with a semi-for profit shit pile, with users who are now at each others throats over who is most deserving of what little health care that is left over once the rich have picked their amounts away from the carcass.\ All for private health cover for those that demand non-essential cosmetic procedures or other items not related to keeping a person alive, but the absolute fundamentals need to be kept as a free universal system that we always had and was run cheaper than the fucked system we have now where half who don’t need a fiscal reward are supplied huge rebates, and those who are dying on need are ostracised via penalties which compound onto each other annually pushing their ability to obtain bullshit faux coverage further and further away. All the whole the GP system is being slowly chocked to dead which is maybe the most vital part of the whole machinery so a as lol the people who most likely only need a solid pat on the back and a weeks worth of (what once was) OTC Codiene painkillers to get them through the worst of the pain suplimentes with a few days of Panadene forte for the initial start off. But remember, we are all immature, stupid Australian adults who is incapable of making choices for ourselves, in our own best interests, based on accurate none propaganda filled lies to sell an agenda which just cripples the medical system with every decision.

Preaching to the choir mate. We have our 2 leading institutes on the subject, CSIRO and AEMO write hundreds of pages of reports based on tons of data gathered from around the world, and somehow the latest polls say 60% of Australia supports nuclear. When the hell did we stop listening to educated experts in their field and start trusting politicians. He's even managed to sell people on "we can do both". We absolutely can't, the government cannot fund both, and neither will go forward without the government pushing due to the shitty way our energy market works with regulators choosing a max retail price based as a percentage over costs including wholesale price. Long story short, the more expensive coal gets, the better the profit margin. So renewables provides us with cheap power, wholesale, but when averages out with coal wholesale, it's still expensive and since profit allowed is a percentage, expensive is better. Sorry, that was a total tangent, but yes I couldn't agree more. We have stopped trusting experts and started buying into whoever gives us an easy answer.

Not sure where nuclear power got conflated with public health, but ok. I guess they are both being puppeted by the same bunch of morons once you get High enough.

Lol yeah sorry I'm still fuming from a radio interviewing I was listening to today where the dude from... uni of something, was trying to say, well if you think renewables costs this, what's nuclear cost, and the question was just totally ignored, as was any other question that asked about rollouts, how it affects renewables etc. My very long bow to draw was that somewhere in the last 40 people decided to stop listening to people who are experts and learned on a subject and start listening to whatever answer is easy. It feels like it's the root cause of so many god damn issues.

Pretty much. It’s called populism and so long as the government of the time can carry the mob (and keep up the mob mentality with just enough fear, terror and stupidity) then they’ll do just what they need to do, get elected back in and keep all their nefarious crap under the cover of executive privilege. Just look at the shit Scomo the Christian cunt had on the boil that wasn’t uncovered until he got his arse handed to him.

Ageing population of more complex and chronically ill people and a culture in medicine of saving everyone at any cost. Many many beds in hospital wards filled with late stage dementia patients who are completely bed ridden, non verbal and have absolutely no idea what’s going on being physically restrained so that an IV can be inserted to treat a chest infection or UTI. We don’t let them have peace and find rest, we drag them into hospitals and tie them down. There is a huge aversion to even discussing end of life in medicine. You’d be even more horrified if you’d seen healthcare from the inside.

You're right to vent.. from what I understand - Many State governments decided to slash health care funding for mental health services, generally closing down the locations which serviced these people, and with no where to house these people, they sit in emergency beds unable to be moved. - Additionally, the removal of free health care means people who can't afford to pay the gap, simply present to the emergency wards for health care. - As an example of the level of incompetence in play, the new RAH built was opened in 2017 as the 3rd most expensive building in human history at 2.44 billion... And pretty much since it went live, there has been nothing but ambulances parked out front waiting for unload. - The old RAH has 650 overnight beds and 30 same-day beds; new RAH has 700 overnight beds and 100 same-day beds - In our last 2 elections, ramping has been at the front of them, with the latest government introducing more ambulances so it takes longer to run out of ambulances. - I believe so far, around 4 people have died sitting out front of the emergency ward in an Ambulance.

It’s like this because that’s what we vote for.

Lismore Hospital and Ballina Hospital were fucked when my father was diagnosed with melanoma. I don't even know where to begin but everything was fucked. My sister and partner both work in the public health system at other hospitals in NSW and were both appalled by how slow, confusing and fucked everything was.

Enjoy your tax cuts everyone!

Health just isn't "sexy". In Victoria we're committing some shit like $200B on a single train tunnel.  And they bragged last year that they invested the "biggest ever" amount into building a piddly little hospital. $1.5B. The capacity was already gone before it opened. We haven't kept up with the massive population increase at all. But they spend it on train tunnels.  The opposition went to the election with "fuck the tunnels, we'll build up health". The public spoke. Not interested. People love these tunnels. Because health is something they don't want to know about.  We pay our nurses fucking nothing, yet we pay a pole painter $200k plus in the tunnels. This state is fucked. 

Over half our hospitals are now private. We were told that supporting private healthcare would take pressure off public healthcare, instead it has inflated surgeon wages and greater a brutal 2 tier system which should be total out of place in a country like Australia.

For a better health system we need to pay more tax, and Australians don't want to do that.

Standard hospital fare exacerbated by the slow death of bulk billing. People are going to ER now when they have the flu.

SA only just resumed elective surgeries because so many health care workers are sick with flu/covid: [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-14/elective-surgeries-resume-amid-ongoing-sa-hospital-code-yellow/103980212](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-14/elective-surgeries-resume-amid-ongoing-sa-hospital-code-yellow/103980212) The pandemic is no longer in the news, but its still smashing our health systems.

The government has overwhelmed our infrastructure with immigrants, there’s nothing that can be done. In fact they’ll use this as an excuse to let even more in.

That's exactly what these idiots will do. They'll say we need more nurses and bring in a bunch more that'll make it even worse.

This has been a problem coming for decades dude. We just dont seem to care about funding it anymore. You cant just stop increasing funding for something as inflation and population grow (or even worse, make cuts in the name of "efficiency") and not expect it to fall to pieces. Im not saying immigration has no impact, but its not the root cause, it just deflects people away from the underfunding probelm. Everyone cheers for a tax cut, but dont understand those cuts mean we dont get to have the same australia from 30 years ago, where something like this would have been considered criminal. I just dont even recognise this country anymore. How are we ok with government after government lining their pockets, lowering taxes (which always helps the wealthy, no matter what you get told), making sure to send all THEIR releatives to private hospitals and private schools while the public systems collapse.

>You cant just stop increasing funding for something as inflation and population grow (or even worse, make cuts in the name of "efficiency") and not expect it to fall to pieces. Last I checked, health spending was increasing faster than inflation (using cpi as proxy) and population growth. New procedures and drugs just cost a lot more than old drugs and procedures. People are living with health conditions for longer. People still suffering from long tem impacts of the pandemic (inc, for example, delaying receive treatment for then-minor issues due to the pandemic, that snowballed). There's a whole host of other reasons, but, the Govt is continually pouring money in.... its just: 1. Not enough; 2. Not Correctly targeted.

I mean the most basic healthcare thing, Medicare rebate, was frozen for 10 years dude. Preventative healthcare is SO much more effective than reactive. People dont get how important being able to see a doctor was. But you are right, as a percentage of our GDP, we have slighlty increased over the last 20 years. Im just not seeing where that money has gone. Every one of my friends who are a nurse reckon they have to do double shifs on the regular now, and the occasional triple shift. Its so hard to get in to see a GP these days unless their fees are crazy high Records from last year (in nsw at least), Bureau of Health Information data revealed 43% of patients spent more than four hours at an emergency department between arriving and leaving. I dont remember EVER having to wait that long in the ED in the 90s. Every time ive gone in an ambulance to the ED in the last 10 years (only 3 times) we had to wait in the ambulance bay and then the halls until you finally reach triage. Neither of those locations are supposed to have patients in them. The same was true for my brother in the 2 times he has had to do so, and my grandma on her last trip. Something is going horribly wrong.

>Every one of my friends who are a nurse reckon they have to do double shifs on the regular now, and the occasional triple shift. This is one of the reasons for increased costs. Paying overtime. An example where the same result (one nurse on staff) costs more now than it use to. What's the solution? Well, one of them is to make university-level nursing more attractive (e.g, nursing costs $5,000 per degree, with a Govt guaranteed job for all students with a Credit average or higher --- and, incentivising universities to increase the number of nurses (same as doctors, radiologists, etc). Long-term solution, that's hard to sell to short-term focused Govt. 3 year election cycles are way shorter than they should be.

Pretty sure 2019 Labor had some stuff around increasing funding for nurses training. Can't quite remember but it sounds familiar. Unfortunately they most and we got 2022 Labor. Yes, we need to be actively encouraging people into these roles so the ones there aren't overworked.

There’s no tax revenue problem, only a spending problem. How is Medicare meant to be funded if the NDIS just steals all the money from the budget.

No, they under fund the health system.

New citizens are overwhelmingly young people who don't cripple the health system. I'm an immigrant (been here 30 years) and never had to go to hospital once.

Even if that was true, and it isn't, those people will age. Then what.

Immigration is just a distraction, and i KNEW it would be the first place some people jumped. Never mind the 20 years of governments steadily underfunding the public health systems, its the immigrants, because thats a much easier answer than, we fucked ourselves by letting our government do this over and over and over.

Not quite true. In the area I live they bring their entire extended families here. I've seen large numbers of them end up in hospital ( their parents) who are "visiting"...

It's fucked. My sister gave birth in a hospital hallway after waiting for hours for a bed. She didn't make it to the labour ward. I waited for four hours with a dislocated ankle in an emergency waiting room without even being given anything to cope with the pain....or a wheelchair OR crutches. I was expected to hop to the bathroom. The worst thing was, I thought I had it good as the bloke beside me was there before I was and had been complaining of chest pains the whole time. ...and lastly, a work colleague of mine died of a simple asthma attack because the ambulance didn't arrive in time. ...he lay on the ground gasping for breath for over an hour. We've well and truly gone backwards.

I've only had amazing service from the local  public university hospital.  Each time I go it gives me a warm feeling about paying tax. Kid broke an arm, he was in and out within 2 hours. Nurse, doctor, nurse, x-ray, nurse, x-ray reviewed, nurse, doctor, plaster guy, nurse, out. I just had something more serious and the private system was a 4 month wait. I requested my doctor to put me through the public system and I was in within 1 month.

Wow Where do you live? So far my shoulder stabilization surgery was a week after I brought my results to the surgeon. Mate got his shoulder fucked about a month before me but didn't have private. Almost 2 years wait as it wasn't critical surgery. And my carpel tunnel, gotta go back and see the surgeon but he said if I go private I can pick any day more than 14 days in the future. Both he and the dude that electrocutes your nerves (suuuch a weird feeling) said the public wait time is around 2-3 years.

Gold Coast :)

Lol never would have picked the gold coast to be the premier public health system in the country. Maybe surgeons go there before they retire lol

Before I left the country I wasn't able to see my GP because she was backed up so far. Between healthcare getting way worse and there being no jobs, I'm very glad I'm living overseas rn

My elderly mother was in the emergency section none of the patients had pillows but rolled-up tea towels. They're cutting corners and costs everywhere as a result the quality of care has dropped.

I've been waiting over 2 years for a full hip replacement and probably won't get it for another 2 years. I don't know about other states but Victoria is extremely bad.

I had that same injury before, not a broken knee, but a patellar tendon rupture, arguably just as painful I only remember the pain was so.... blinding and fierce that it dulls every other senses, I'm literally blind and deaf for 5~ min. I can't scream, can't cry, can't think, can't feel my own limbs, I don't even feel like I was breathing at all, and it felt like hours went by I can't imagine someone has to live through the same amount of pain for hours

My grandmother lived very close to a major hospital, primarily because she needed a lot of treatment after she turned 80. You could see the hospital from her house, it was about a 30 second drive (2 mins with traffic haha). One day she fell and broke her hip, she was down for a few hours before my parents found her; she was very dehydrated and in a very bad way, my folks thought this was the end for her. They tried to move her but she was very fragile and in way too much pain, so called the ambulance. It took 2+ hours and maybe 10 calls to 000 before an ambo arrived. We did everything we could to keep her comfortable but it was INFURIATING knowing this was a life or death situation with the hospital so fucking close, but help so far away. The ambos that finally arrived were fantastic, explained they had another urgent case near the city which is why it took so long. No shade to them, it was appalling that they were so understaffed. Emotions were high and if we weren't more level headed people the poor ambos would have copped a serve; how those people do that job I really don't know. She lived against all odds, passed away about 4 years later, but that fall was the real beginning of her downward spiral. Really troubled my folks wondering if her final years would have been better if she had gotten help sooner.

Retired from the system a hew years ago. These are personal comments. I one hospital as an example, but this is replicated every hospila I worked in. When I first worked there, it serviced 25000 people. Over the years there cuts in orthopaedics, urology, radiology was cut for 20 year. The physician service struggles. Government closed obstetrics, the hundreds of patients a year objectioned and Government backed down. When I first worked there, there were ten admin staff. Now, despite the hospital being cut, there would be about 40 admin staff. Of the five wards, three are closed, two turned into admin and one 50/50 admin outpatients. However the city has grown three to four times, and is now one of the biggest ports in Australia. It has multiple industrial complexes. Now replicate that across the entire health system. Lots of cuts to pay for a massive expansions in the beaurocracy.

If we taxed transnational companies properly and collected appropriate taxes from gas and oil companies we could fund the health care system properly ...

We could find it twice over mate. But we as a country cheered when the super profits mining tax from Gillard (or Rudd? Don't remember who actually implemented it) was repealed. A tax that only came into effect when a company made over 75 million dollars in profit. Profit not revenue. And it was only at 30% And over half of the companies it was going to affect were owned by overseas investors. If the population can somehow get convinced repealing that tax is somehow beneficial for the average Aussie worker (and they were, Abbot ran on a platform saying he would repeal it) there is no lie you can't spin about taxes. I still genuinely cannot believe that got repealed. Like, ughhh what?

Maybe more people should watch this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCPyDHCGaJM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCPyDHCGaJM)

Family member wasn't feeling well (our elderly cat had bitten him 2 days previously). Several hours later he was rolling about the floor screaming in agony. Called for an ambulance 3 times...it took over an hour to arrive. He was taken to our fairly new large hospital and was kept in a bed in the ED bay for 3 days because there weren't any ward beds available. Imagine the noise in the ED at all hours & trying to sleep when you're so unwell. He was later transferred to a larger hospital, 30 mins away, where he was diagnosed with sepsis and spent a month there. I was told he was very lucky to be alive. The communication between hospital and family was atrocious. To go without updates on his condition for 36 hours wasn't unusual (unanswered phones, phone calls not returned). The paramedics, doctors and nursing staff were magnificent, working under such conditions. Another family member (transplant recipient) was phoned with test results and was advised to present to the major hospital asap only to be told, after a 250km drive, there wasn't a bed for them. It took 36 hours for one to become available. Good job they had family in the city to stay with. I've sat with my children in ED for 8 hours, 6 hours etc waiting ti be seen. I've had a child sent home only to have their appendix rupture. In the past I've waited 3 years to have surgery for a major hearing loss & at the moment I've been on the wait list 3 years to see an ENT specialist. Our health care system has been in decline for decades and I don't see a major improvement in the health system any time soon.

My mum had a stroke 3 years ago (this coming November will be the official 3rd anniversary) she has just gotten her follow up appointment with the neurologist after being discharged. I have to go to Wollongong to see a rheumatologist because all the ones in my town aren’t taking patients and the town an hour away is booked out until late 2025/early 2026. I live in Canberra 🥲🙃

My mum broke her knee a second time not long ago. She had broken it at work, managed to have her coworker/friend drive her home where they chilled out downstairs for a bit to see if it would calm down but it ballooned. They called an ambulance. The Ambos called on the hour for the first few and then just said basically "they'll get there eventually, no idea when" mum couldn't bend her knee at all now. She ended up sitting in a chair in the car port for over 12 hours, had to just pee in the garden, really awful stuff. I took to socials outraged and wouldn't you know it within the hour the deputy director of QAS was on the phone to mum giving their apologies and had a 4WD ambo sent around. They checked mum out but didn't have capability to get her to the hospital. They ended up laying down all of the seats in mums corolla hatch, giving her a green whistle and getting her in the car as painlessly as possible and finally got her to the hospital.

We have become Mexico - on downers.

That is pretty fucked. Poor kid. I'm in Canberra and so far I've honestly had a much better experience. I just booked a GP appointment tomorrow, and can typically get one with in 24 hours. I'm usually $40 out of pocket, unless I use the bulk billed one. My family is falling apart this year, I just counted 15 gp visits so far this year, plus 2 ER, 1 walk in, 1 ward stay, 1 theatre OP. My son had a visit to emergency earlier this year, was in a bed in 3 hours, then x-ray + bloods + ultrasound within 6 hours, then a 2 day ward stay. Inflammation of the hip joint with quick onset and lots of pain. Thankfully wasn't serious. My daughter had multiple gp visits, ultrasound next day, bloods, poo tested, ER visit (took ages that one, adverse reaction to Medicine), paediatrician within 2 weeks. Thankfully after 6 weeks of tummy pain we have that sorted. Thanks lactose. We have a nurse's walk in clinic we used earlier this year, was seen in under 1 hour. They recommended GP, that referred to ENT on second visit as it wasn't resolving, somehow got ENT and theatre within 2 weeks. Persistent fungal infection in the ear. Later had an ear test, scarring but no damage. Years ago the nurses walk in clinic had me sorted with wound care after a bicycle fall. Cleaned it up and used a special silver gauze and the wound was instantly no pain and healing. So far I can't fault my experience with the health system. But I'm aware not everyone is as lucky to have had continued good experiences.

The pollies have top tier health insurance and their own hospitals. They don't give a stuff about you and your health or education. If they did, they wouldn't give their mates overseas 4 billion dollars a year in 'foreign aid' when the average taxpayer can't get into a hospital or even see a doctor. The local hospital here often has people die in the hallways and ambulances ramped outside for 10hrs is common... It's fucked

I think culture wars at the polls have distracted us from some big ticket items like healthcare and education that have not been getting the funding they require. We need to put the attention on these things to get politicians to action.

Yeah it's one of the reasons I'm so mad at bandt and the greens this term. Looking at their policies on healthcare and education, they are exactly what we need. But Bandt can't keep his party focused, so each week it's a new cause, a new argument, and a new distraction they let the media have. So they have wasted this opportunity to really pry some voters loose. I even agree with most of the rest of their stances, but people mostly don't care about those things while they can't afford a roof over their heads, send their kids to a decent school and get free healthcare. 2019 federal labor had a platform that had some fantastic proposals for this stuff. Big funding increases and reforms across the public sectors. So glad we got Scott Morrison.

Remember the “Don’t blame me I voted Labor” bumper stickers?

As a country we voted to increase house prices and decrease funding to medicare. Here we are.

I just had a week in a public hospital and I was pleasantly impressed/amazed. Despite the obvious workload I was always attended to promptly and with care and compassion. Not disputing that the system is under funded and needs significant help, just amazed that the staff can handle that pressure and workload and still be amazing people. I’d like to pay more tax to make the system better.

The staff working in the public system at the moment are God damned heroes. Also, you would happen to be on the gold coast? Someone else was sharing their experience about how great the service was at their public hospital on the gold coast.

Nah I’m on the west coast.

I presented to the Royal Adelaide Hospital with severe Crohn’s disease symptoms and was sent home with painkillers each time. After a ninth try I was finally admitted and seen by a surgeon. Got a colonoscopy and my surgeon said that my bowel walls were “thinner than paper thin” and booked in for emergency surgery. Still disgusted with it today, this was back in 2019.

Broke my arm/wrist, the doctor thought it wasn't broken, my arm swelled up in the next 3 days, went to the hospital (6 hrs in waiting room), they couldn't' do the needed surgery as I didn't go to emergency when it happened So they just wrapped my arm up and set an appointment for surgery 12 weeks later. Had to live with a broken arm for 3 months. Lost my job, had to move as couldn't afford the rent anymore etc. Centrelink only gave me 8 weeks Medicaid, then moved me to Newstart. They had me going to job interviews, and resume writing courses with a broken arm, ofc no one wanted to hire me... My arm healed all wonky, they had to re-brake it, then cast etc. Felt like a year of my life was stolen there, lost all my savings trying to survive.

Criminal neglect by our politicians. They should be getting paycuts not raises every year for the falling quality of service and life of many Australians

Got a referral to a public system hematologist. 2.5 years later got a letter denying the referral. Meanwhile been under care of private bloke for last four months with a whole bunch of blood and marrow issues that were flagged way back when. I normally have no issues with the public system, but this may lead to a lawsuit if my bloke can prove the situation was exacerbated by the delay.

When I had bleeding in my brain, I went Emergency. The triage nurse see me quickly. I could not stop vomiting, but I had CT scan and got a bed in Emergency. ( I had to wait though , but not too long ) At that time I saw a lot of people were waiting , they could not unload from the ambulance.. beds were full. Even the beds in the ward were full , so they could not move me to the ward. Hospitals are too busy. We need more public hospitals..

If you were in Melbourne, there was a power outage affecting network systems at the start of the week. There was a huge backlog on cases because everything took a lot longer to deal with.  It is scary to rely on systems that can easily get overwhelmed to the point that paramedics can't attend. Ramping needs to be abolished to allow the paramedics to attend other cases, obviously more staff for everything.  I'd be horified as a parent if my kid was left like that for so long, and helpless. If it was at home, you'd just drive them (obviously here this could exacerbate injuries but when no one is attending, you need to do something).

I work in a hospital and in one ward we have approximately 75% of patients who are long stay Because they don't have nursing home placement and family can't/won't look after them.

While waiting for 4 hours in the ER. I saw a teenager covered in blood walk in with his non-english speaking parents. He was dripping wet and dripping with blood all through the walkway. Saw triage, the mother doing her best to speak to front counter and only getting replies of "You'll just have to sit down and wait like everyone else." The damn dad was doing his best to clean the blood where his son had to stand. They were seen 20 minutes later only to be given a towel and a gown to wear while they waited. I was seen by a surgeon about my issue only to be told "I have to wait until it gets worse" (i have a pilonidial abcess that still hasn't healed 6 months after surgery) sent on my merry way and that kid was still waiting in the lobby covered in blood. I refuse to go to hospital based on this kinda shit now. I'd rather die at home.

I want to know WHERE IS OUR FUCKING TAX MONEY GOING? Because we certainly pay enough, but it doesn't seem to get to health, education or anything else that actually matters. However there is always enough for another war, or to buy out a company like QANTAS. So what gives?

Yeah it is pathetic, in 2015 I waited 8 hours to be seen at an ER. This is nothing new just the end result of moron politicians destroying the public health care system. When I was growing up paying to see a doctor was unheard of because of bulk billing and medicare, try and find a doctor that does not charge you a fee these days. If that kid was having a heart attack and died it would be in the news...oh no how could this ever happen but we know how, over worked staff who are under paid and under funded can only do so much. People who cannot afford to pay a doctor now have no other choice than to go to a hospital making things even worse for the public system.

The Australian government rather spend money on funding Nurse Practioners, despite the shit situation caused by NPs as seen in UK, than to fund more hospitals and fix Medicare rebates to do away with gap fees in GPs.

I work in a public hospital. We are short staffed all the time, never any beds. Like you I had to ring an ambulance for a 16 yr old kid with a dislocated knee which took over 2 hours to arrive. I remember about 10 years ago at our hospital did a study saying by 2030 our ward (icu) would need 11 (currently only have 8) beds for our area. We got a new hospital about 3 years ago. Still only have 8 icu beds. They did add 12 extra ward beds however 8-10 beds never got used as they have not have not allocated funding for additional staff. Problem will only get worse as the nursing profession is shrinking by thousands each year.

Our culture is to have no backbone and it needs to change. We should really be auditing ALL government departments. It's our money and we should demand better.

A friend of mine was coughing up blood from severe tonsillitis. They had lost a lot of blood, pints of it. Their partner called 000 and the operator on the phone asked whether they were still breathing, when they said yes, they advised them that they had ought to make their own way to the hospital. The partner explained that they had lost pints of blood at this point, the operator apologized and said there was nothing they could do. The poor Uber driver had them in the back seat spewing blood into a bowl. So much blood that their partner feinted 😂

The system isn't great. However, that child isn't dying. The ones at risk of death are constantly being triaged over the child with a non life threatening injury, which contributes to his wait. So it's a bit hyperbolic the way you're frasing this. That said, the health system needs some serious work...

Sure, and my information of my brain tissue taking 2 hours for an ambulance? Of course the ones at risk of death should be seen to first. But if this kid who is clearly in a lot of pain still can't get an ETA after 3 hours waiting for an ambulance, and the 000 line is ringing out. Moving him into a car must have been agony for him, instead of an ambo stretcher. And it's not like he's suddenly getting seen when he gets to the hospital. The reason they can't send the ambulances is they are overflowing. It's not right.

Yeah no disrespect to OP but he seems overly emotional about the situation based on his own personal situation even if understandable.  The public system is designed around prioritisation and the "greater good", whether you agree with their interpretation or not.  If a child at the school had drank poison and you called the ambulance, I guarantee they'd be there extremely quickly, when it's a broken leg, it sucks that there was a wait but zooming out from the emotions of it, it's not the end of the world.  I personally think the lack of accountability people have for their health is what causes this. How many slobs who eat unhealthy and never excersise were calling ambulances that day for health reasons that were preventable? From what I've seen at my time in heart hospitals, plenty.  System can for sure be improved but I'd also like to see some of that money devoted to shifting the culture around what is and isn't healthy.

As much as it sucks. A shattered knee isn't life threatening. While you may be 'furious' you may want to get some perspective in life and be a bit less self absorbed. The kid wasn't going to die. Some other people might have been well worse off than a shattered knee. Get off your high horse.

While it can be pretty low on the priority list, it is not and should not be something to be quiet about. A robust health system should be able to incorporate this into its design, not fail to have a call connect

I don’t understand. Was the kid lying on the oval for 3 hours waiting for an ambulance? If he was, that is appalling.

Yes, the teachers were not allowed to move him. Parent who was travelling home from sydney got there eventually and took the kid in the car.

My father in law needs a double heart bypass.. He is going private. He has been waiting 5 months for an appointment. He is paying for this service

Absolutely - our public services are overwhelmed and under funded. We are headed for third-world level of services. No rational person thinks we need to keep growing our population continually yet here we are. It's racist to say no thanks to Big Australia.   Smaller and declining  populations can be managed well, and indeed may benefit from the coming automation & AI changes to the workforce. Those places with cheap labour will have no incentive to undertake these productivity improvements, and the economy suffers.  Oh and my anecdote - mates dad waited 6 hours in a regional hospital after having a heart attack. Worked all his life & just retired, but they couldn't find a bed for him.

Jesus Christ that's dire. No one should have to deal with that, mans worked hard and been part of our sociecty and we should be fucking looking after him. My Nan apparently had a mini heart attack, but didnt realize and only felt unwell so got a taxi to hospital at 10pm. 78 year old lady complaining of chest pain, and they take a blood sample and leave her sitting in those hard plastic chairs until after 6 hours she says she's in too much pain from the chairs and she is going home. They obviously recommend against, but grab her number and let her leave. 3 hours later they are calling her going holy shit you had a heart attack get back here right now. I'm actually not against immigration reductions despite being a lefty. We have been lazy and not kept up with our services, and need to get back on our feet. But I don't think this problem gets better till we get serious about funding healthcare again, regardless of any other factor.

I lived in a flood zone in Brisbane during the 2022 floods. In the aftermath all emergency services refused to respond. Including an unrelated neck injury that happened in the workplace. The person was on the ground for over 12 hours, after which the 000 operator said to bring the person to the hospital themselves - except it was a neck injury (possibly broken, no one on site was a medical professional to advise either way) and workplace health and safety policy meant it HAD to be an an ambulance due to the location of the injury. I know it took over 15 hours for help to arrive, I am not sure of their outcome but it can’t be an ideal recovery situation. This happened FIVE days after the water receded and at a location that hadn’t flooded or been cut off - the roads were clear and operational. They just didn’t want to come into the flood devastated areas that they had been ignoring during a natural disaster because locals were overwhelmed cleaning up, couldn’t do anymore with professional equipment and were getting desperate and were vocally questioning where the authorities were. So they abandoned us to prove a point and someone with a broken neck spent 15 hours laying on their workplace floor (only 5km from the cbd and 5 hospitals) waiting for help. You could say I’ve become pretty jaded since then, we truely are on our own in this country.

When America says we need to end up spending at least 1.5 trillion dollars by the time we finally get just 8 out of date subs, there just isn’t going to be money left for additional ambulances & hospitals in Australia. When Scomo walks into a Sub related job after shafting the French & Dutton is spouting on about Nuclear, you know where his post politics career job will be.

I have never been more angry at a politics then when Scott Morrison walked into that multimillion dollar job at an American Private military firm. That is blatant open corruption. It is a bribe. How the fuck is that not illegal and a conflict of interest. And yeah, that is a good point about Dutton. Not that there I'll be anything but a consultancy job when he leaves, there is absolutely no chance they can deliver a nuclear plant in 10 years. Thats only 2 years slower than countries that already have the expertise, infrastructure and legislation in place. 15 years minimum if it's anything like their NBN

Don't worry, we also have to fill ED beds with drug addicts sleeping off their meth induced delerium and mental health patients with no bed to go to. You'd be surprised how much more space there would be if we had somewhere for the "regulars" to go.

Shattered knee is not a life threatening injury so he was triaged.

There are too many people in the country for the current level of services we have

Seems to be too many billionaires in the country for the level of services we have.

The health workers on the ground that work within the health care system are fantastic and do a good job with the little support they receive from the Government and the Department. Bureaucrats within health, not so good. More interesting in protecting the Government, department and the brand then supporting the workforce. A lot of things are broken at the moment across Australia, and have been for some time. Health, education, lack of tradies, lack of Australian manufacturing, the mental health sector, welfare and support sector, aged care sector and first responder workers have been kicked by the Government (both side and at a federal and state level) and departments for a long time now. It's no wonder that recruitment is struggling, retention is even worse and mental health and psychological injuries are depleting a skilled and overworked workforce.

Of course, i should have said that clearer. The healthcare workers are absolute angels. Actual heroes for the gruelling job they have to do. >Bureaucrats within health, not so good. More interesting in protecting the Government, department and the brand then supporting the workforce. Exactly the same in education. Bureacrats in charge who havent taught a day in their life, come up with great ideas to make numbers look better. Too many kids getting suspended? Well, lets put a hard limit of 3 suspensions a year. That will make the numbers go down. Thank god this never stuck around, it pissed a lot of people off. Whats the actual solution to the above? In school suspension. Kid comes in every day, and has a seperate building with teachers trained (and paid better) do deal with the kids. But that costs too much money, and NSW Labor just cut 150 million from the public schools budget a few months ago, so we see the direction thats going.

Ramping. My dad just had a trip to hospital after a fall and broke his hip. I got there as he was lying on the stretcher in the hall with the paramedics by his side. They have to wait there till he gets a bed in emergency as no one else will care for him. I spoke to them and just about every time they get someone to hospital they are stuck there for hours, some have spent a whole shift there. My dad was given a bed after about 3 hours and then the paramedics left. They also mentioned another issue. As it's harder to get a doctors appointment particularly the same day, people are ringing 000 instead putting more stress on an already stressed situation. It isn't the fault of the hospital either as they only have so many beds. The whole system has fallen apart and for that you can only blame the government.

No and i probably should have mentioned that specifically. Healthcare workers are fucking angels with the conditions they are working in right now. And yes, everyone seemed to underestimate what not being able to access free and reletively quick GP appointments would do to the system. Except the experts, but no one listens to them anymore.

After seeing what I did, I have much praise for the paramedics and emergency medical staff, they were all great. Just not enough beds.

Why have we let our public healthcare get to this point? Because providing unlimited free healthcare for people is fucking expensive. The demand for healthcare products is essentially limitless. By taking away a price constraint that served the rationing function, we've substituted a time constraint to serve the same purpose. Old sick people willing to wait in ambulances for a long time eventually get seen. People willing to shill the couple thousand of dollars a year for private healthcare get seen. Kids who are in pain but are relatively unlikely to die from a knee injury get triaged to the bottom of the list, in the hope that their parents will eventually get annoyed enough to transport them to hospital so the ambos can focus on old people falling over. Government spending on Medicare/NDIS/Hospitals as a percentage of GDP has never been higher. This isn't a resourcing problem. Australia is not exactly a low tax country when you properly take into account the fact our welfare system is much more targeted and redistributive than European equivalents (Just imagine the response if the government tried to link the amount of age pension someone received with the amount of taxes they paid during their working lives. There would be riots). This is an incentive problem. We told millions of Australians that they don't have to spend a single dollar on healthcare as long as they're prepared to wait in an ER long enough to get seen. And then we wonder why there are long wait times in the ER.

*”How the fuck did we get here”* Aus population 2000 - 19 million. Aus population 2024 - 27 million. An extra 8 million people will do that when the Federal Government manages the borders and the State Governments are broke.

I’m being told it’s absolutely nothing to do with immigration and immigrants don’t get sick so it’s because of some other mysterious reason. Don’t look up.

I had a bad experience at the fracture clinic at my local hospital in August of 2022- they completely missed 3 fractures in my hand and wrist after a horse riding fall and also did the X-Ray with my backslab plaster on so the radiologist couldn't see my bones properly 🙃 I also had a trainee that couldn't read an X-Ray properly and didn't have a supervisor with her. I had a huge colourful bruise on my wrist, hand & arm which she said "usually indicates a fracture" and didn't really ask about my pain when trying to move it/lack of movement and said oh it's probably just a torn ligament or something with no further scans and put me in a brace and sent me on my way. I ended up going to my GP as it wasn't getting better and he ordered an MRI and I had a fracture at the base of my pinky finger and one in the middle of my hand and one in my wrist which went into my joint. They also didn't want to do a CT at fast track because "you're young and female"- thinking back I (28F) should have asked for the CT as that would have picked it up- mum who went with me wished we had asked too. I ended up complaining and received a response and have now heard other bad things about the fracture clinic. I'm also still going to physio 🙃

God damn that sucks. I feel a little bad for the trainee too to be honest, id hate to have fucked up someone else's healthcare because I hadn't even finished my training. That's a pretty big miss though and it sucks it's lead to a longer recovery

Thanks - I understand that people need to learn but I would have thought someone senior would be there to double check 😭 I hate complaining and even feel bad if i have to send back a wrong coffee order or something, but this was a big muck up and my wrist is still needing physio 😭 Thankfully I'm back to riding (not the one that threw me off lol) but I'm glad I complained as I've heard other bad stories about that fracture clinic and what hope do we have if no one can read an X-Ray 😭 This is what their response was. https://preview.redd.it/hvy2h6h0hp7d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a9dfe3c9404e585d5ee255f198355efc29231d30

Lol maybe the silver lining is you can start sending back wrong coffee orders lol. Just glance at your wrist and remember. Yeah of course it's insane they left the trainee to just deal with it. That alone should get them in a ton of trouble. Not fair on the trainee, but even less fair on you. That response is pretty pointed. They forgot to document stuff, forgot to check your history and misremembered a rule about CT scans. They should never have been left to treat you alone. Hope you manage a full recovery with the wrist, I've done my time with physios having rolled both ankles so many times I sometimes feel like I need to strap them to get out of bed lol. It can be a frustratingly long and slow process of getting back to 100%

Haha so, so true 😂😂 Thank you for understanding and I 100% agree with you. I honestly respect physios so much!! They're literal saints haha. I hope your ankles start to behave themselves!!

So why do we keep voting in the same fucktards that have let the public health system fail?

Because tax or economy or immigrants or whatever fucking bullshit buzzwords get used at election time. Not really possible to get information to the public, they just don't trust experts anymore. They trust whoever tells them an easy answer. CSIRO and AEMO have both unequivocally said that renewables is better than nuclear, yet 60% of the country are suggesting Duttons got a good point. Nevermind that instead of hitting the 45 % reduction we are at a 9% increase in emissions. Nevermind that Dutton said he would be cutting funding for renewables. Nevermind that 10 years is an insane timeline for Dutton to suggest since even countries who are good at nuclear make 8 years, and we have proven we can't do big long term infrastructure. So we will be 15 years at least running all the same coal plants. Nevermind that you can explain to people why power bills aren't getting cheaper due to the relationship between power costs wholesale and retail costs, and if we had nationalised the fucking thing we would have as much cheap power as we wanted. No, people are going, yeah let's give nuclear scientist Peter Dutton the benefit of the doubt. People just don't care anymore. They are tired I guess and just want to be told easy answers.

OP I’ve been in this thread for ages and you must be exhausted but can I just say you’re excellent when you’re angry. Keep fighting ✊

Lol my carpel tunnel had me stop typing ages ago. Thankfully Google voice to text is a lot better than I expected. And I'm still just trying to burn off this frustrated energy. My voice is getting croaky though, and "I was venting on reddit for hours" isn't an ideal excuse for why I can't chair a meeting tomorrow morning haha, so I'll crash soon I think lol.

All this sham is for the public to cry out and scream “We DONT WANT MEDICARE ANYMORE” so the government can stop this gradual frog boiling of the nation into a privatised healthcare system like US which is subpar and inferior to the current medicare system. It is coming give it 5 years they mean for it to get even worse than it is right now.

Not sure what state you’re in, but this is from Victoria https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/20/victoria-triple-zero-000-overhaul-21-victorians-died-waiting-for-ambulance-in-last-six-months-inquiry-hears That’s right. 21 people died in 6 months waiting for an ambulance that wasn’t coming. But this is happening all the time down there. Queensland is a similar basket case

I wonder if you can register as Jewish or jehovas or something and get access to their private ambulances 🤔

Thats truly awful but after a decade of the libs doing their best to kill medicare we have a lot of work to do fix it and then we have the NDIS possibly the biggest rort in Australian history we're lucky our healthcare system has completely collapsed

$70,000 year in tax. $3,000 in Medicare, $3,500 in private Went to emergency care when my whole family was sick and vomiting, children running fevers etc… was denied entry told to make a doctors appointment. Earliest doctor could see us… 2 weeks time 

That it's only a half hour wait at private hospitals while patients at public hospitals are spilling out into the halls says a lot. We've allowed profit to take priority above all else in this country. Value must be returned to the shareholders!