The Mercury’s front page story on January 12 about Maitland Hospital’s emergency department going to code red – its highest response level – to deal with a bottleneck of patients has made its way to state politics.
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The opposition, under new leader Luke Foley, has lodged freedom of information applications with Hunter New England Health to find out more about patient bottlenecks and code red alerts.
The Mercury believes this can only be a good thing.
We accept that on the surface it is political – the opposition looking to score points politically over the government and then criticise them for under-resourcing the region. With a state election coming up, that’s totally understandable. It’s called politics.
But from our point of view, this is something else altogether. It’s about getting one of the state’s fastest
growing cities the hospital it needs – and not just for now, but with an eye to the future.
So we would stress to Hunter New England Health that this isn’t a criticism. We have no reason to doubt that they’re doing a brilliant job in trying circumstances.
And we also acknowledge what acting HNEH general manager Velda Sturt said: that code red is in place so that the hospital will have strategies and responses in place to deal with a patient bottleneck.
But a clear indication of how severe the problem is – if at all – can’t hurt.
When Luke Foley visited Maitland recently, he told the Mercury that our city was vital to Labor’s election prospects.
He’s after votes. So, political or not, all we want for the people of Maitland is the best hospital possible to cope with our rapidly growing region.
Let the politics begin.
