Our local hospital has been in the news a lot in recent months as plans for the new Maitland hospital are finalised. A Mercury staffer shares her experience at the hospital this week.
Maitland hospital is bursting at its seams.
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Believe me I know.
It’s a phrase I’ve often heard and written about over the years. Hospital staff have said it, the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association has mentioned it and even politicians have commented on it.
That’s one of the reasons the campaign for a bigger and better new Maitland hospital is so important to our city.
If the new hospital at Metford isn’t big enough and doesn’t go far enough to cater for our accelerating population, at some point the strained health system is going to bite you.
This week it bit my family.
I felt powerless in a hospital system that is struggling to keep up with the demand.
It started when a family member got sick and needed to go to the emergency department. The staff, although obviously overworked and extremely busy, were wonderful. They were kind, experienced, informative and very thorough.
But the system they were working in was letting them down.
They didn’t have the exact type of medication that was needed and had been cleared by the specialist, and they couldn’t obtain it quickly from somewhere else. So, they had to use another medication that did the same thing.
Then came the biggest issue of all. Beds.
They didn’t have any. Not a single bed, so we spent 18 hours in the emergency ward.
Part of that was in a quieter corner that wasn't that quiet at all.
It’s hard to sleep when there’s a busy emergency department operating around you.
Unfortunately we weren’t the only ones in that situation either.
During the long stint in emergency staff offered to transfer us to Maitland Private Hospital, but they didn’t have any beds either, so we were put on a waiting list.
I’ve since been told that the private hospital is filling up a lot more because of the demand in this quickly growing area.
Whatever funding model and system is put in place for the new Maitland hospital, it needs to be able to cater for our population now and a very long time into the future.
And it needs to have a lot of beds.