Incredible bungle: Queensland hospital bureaucrats build TWO unusable operating theatres

HOSPITAL bosses spent $2.5 million building two operating theatres, and then shut them down because doctors said they were unsafe to use. The theatres built for cardiac surgery at Brisbane's Prince Charles Hospital have been out of action for a month while modifications are made. Doctors say it has put a strain on resources, meaning patients are having to wait even longer for operations.

But managers described the situation as "normal" and denied that patients were suffering. They refused to reveal how much the renovation work would cost taxpayers, but said it involved changing benches, a stock room, flooring, airconditioning and electrics [just a few things!] in order to meet workplace health and safety guidelines.

One senior staff member, who can't be named because Queensland Health has banned its staff from speaking out, said the situation was "extremely serious". He said: "The fact is, people needing cardio procedures are dying while we sit here and look at new surgical theatres we can't use because the Government stuffed up building them. "They're boarded up because they are the wrong size and the wrong building materials have been used."

Figures show there are 391 patients on the waiting list for heart operations at the Prince Charles Hospital, of whom 57 have been waiting longer than is considered clinically safe. The theatres were in use for only two months before staff found the range of problems.

Mary Montgomery, district manager for Northside Health Service District, said staff had since been consulted [What an original idea!] about the modifications. "It is normal for any new operating theatre to have an adjustment period in which some refinements and modifications may need to be made," she said. "It is only through using the new theatre that any necessary adjustments can be identified."

Opposition health spokesman John-Paul Langbroek said it was not "normal" to factor an adjustment period into an expensive project. "I can't believe we have credible people saying it's normal to spend $2.5 million on operating theatres and then to find fault with them," he said. "It doesn't happen in private enterprise because businesses would go broke if they ran things like that."

Queensland Health has a history of shutting down its operating theatres. In March, The Sunday Mail reported how theatres at Ipswich, Logan and Redland hospitals were out of action because there were too few staff to run them. Previously, a theatre at the Princess Alexandra Hospital was used as a storeroom for four years. It was opened only after a Sunday Mail report prompted health bosses to take action.

The above story by HANNAH DAVIES appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on May 3, 2007




PM warns of 'Garrett recession' over Greenie emission controls

AUSTRALIA faces a recession it does not have to have if voters back Kevin Rudd at the next federal election and endorse Labor's preference for big cuts to carbon emissions. This was the warning from John Howard yesterday as he urged voters to consider "who do you trust to make these vital decisions about our future". The Prime Minister asked the electorate to weigh up whether Labor could manage the economy through the climate issue, the "most important economic decision in the next decade".

Mr Howard was speaking at the Liberals' last set-piece meeting before the federal election, the Liberal Party federal council in Sydney, where he shifted ground after years of denying that Australia could go it alone on combating climate change. He promised to set a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions after the federal election and to create a carbon trading system by 2012. Adopting the findings of his hand-picked emissions trading task group released last week, Mr Howard claimed his resistance as a virtue, saying it was now time to create a system that would serve Australia's economic priorities.

The Prime Minister singled out Labor environment spokesman Peter Garrett for ridicule, warning that his preference for big cuts to carbon emissions was a recipe for a recession. Mr Howard said Mr Garrett's proposal to cut emissions by 20per cent of 1990 levels by the year 2020 could only be met by replacing every coal-fired and gas-fired power station with a nuclear plant and removing every car, truck and motorbike from the Australian roads.

"Can I say that again, removing all vehicles from our roads," he told conference delegates. "A 20 per cent cut from 1990 levels from 2020 would be the recipe for a Garrett recession. That is not a recession which Australia has to have. Labor wants to approach the biggest economic challenge of our time with a policy framed in Europe for European conditions, as if Australia were a small, densely populated nation with high winds somewhere east of Denmark."

His move to highlight the economic risk associated with addressing climate change came on the eve of an opinion poll showing growing support for the Coalition. The Galaxy poll, published today, has the Coalition up four points to 47 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis and Labor slipping four points to 53per cent.

Mr Howard yesterday said the world was not about to end because of climate change, "but equally we would be foolish to ignore the accumulated scientific evidence that mankind's behaviour has contributed to the process of global warming". "We must get this right," he said. "If we get this wrong, it will do enormous damage to our economy; to jobs and to the economic wellbeing of ordinary Australians, especially low-income households. The question I pose to the Australian people, quite directly, is this: who do you trust to take the vital decisions about our future?" The Coalition's "aspirational" emissions target would be set only after an exhaustive study by the federal Treasury, an approach that stood in stark contrast to Labor, Mr Howard said.

Labor says it would like to see a 60 per cent cut in emissions from 2000 levels by 2050, with a trading system up and running by 2010, and has commissioned former senior public servant Ross Garnaut to examine the issue. The Opposition Leader said last night that after 11 years, Mr Howard was trying to convince voters he was not a climate change sceptic by not revealing his target until after the election and doing nothing to stop emissions for five years. "His only target is the upcoming election," Mr Rudd said.

Mr Garrett said Mr Howard's "outrageous" comments warning of a recession were an affront to leading companies represented on the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change, including BP, Origin Energy and Visy, which had independently endorsed a target of a 60 per cent cut in emissions by 2020. Mr Garrett said Mr Howard was in "disarray" after having rallied against unilateral action in the past. "The very clear message that comes from the Prime Minister today is that he is only seeing climate change through the eyes of his electoral prospects."

In his speech, Mr Howard endorsed businesses's preferred model of a "cap and trade" system - where a federal government issues permits, either for free or at a nominal price of $20 for one year at the beginning of the scheme. Businesses can trade with their permits or pay a penalty for more. Over time the market would determine the price of carbon.

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University of NSW fails economics

The place is run by a Prof. of business management so you expect him to know nothing about real-life business -- and so it has proved to be

THE University of NSW will pay up to 148 students stranded by the closure of its Singapore campus as much as $85,000 each to study in Sydney. Compensation, redundancies and lost revenue could mean the failed venture's costs could amount to more than $40 million. The university will pay students for travel, visa and accommodation costs in Sydney for the life of their degree. Another 126 students are eligible for return air fares to Sydney and 12 months' accommodation in compensation. UNSW vice-chancellor Fred Hilmer has admitted that $17.5 million had been spent on the Tanglin campus before it opened this year.

The shortfall in enrolments for the first semester had cost a projected $15 million in revenue because only 148 of the anticipated 300 students signed up. UNSW Asia had leased a building from the Singapore Government until the end of 2009, when its Changi campus was supposed to open.

The university has flown in "teams of people" to Singapore to help students with visa applications. It may face penalties for not seeing through the deal. The NSW Auditor-General's Report To Parliament 2005 said the Singapore Economic Development Board would provide funding, capped at $S100 million ($78 million), for start-up costs over the first 10 years. The board's managing director, Ko Kheng Hwa, said the terms that were typically offered "normally comprise tax incentives, loans or grants, which are recallable if pre-agreed milestones and outcomes are not met".

As well, 64 local academic and general staff employed by UNSW Asia are yet to agree on redundancy packages. Another 41 staff from Australia are unsure about their future. An Australian academic, who did not want to be named, said his wife had given up a good job to move to Singapore and he had taken a two-year lease on a house. "There are many senior professors who have moved here, who have given up senior positions at ANU and other universities, sold family houses, given up retirement plans, to move here with young children," he said. He said the damage to UNSW's reputation, and those of Australian universities in general, was enormous. "UNSW has killed off any hope of ever marketing itself as an international university, certainly in our lifetime. "It has been a monumental mismanagement."

Another academic believes that only between four and six of the Australian teaching staff out of a faculty of 48 will be offered jobs at the Sydney campus because of recent redundancies and a freeze on casual staff. "There are a group of very distressed people who are desperate for information from the university and it's not coming," he said.

In announcing the closure, UNSW promised all students a place in the same course in Sydney. Of the 148 students who enrolled, 100 Singapore residents will be offered $17,340 a year for the duration of their degree. The other 48 will be offered $9460 a year. This will total almost $2.2 million a year. President of the UNSW's student representative council Jesse Young said: "It's a disappointing waste of taxpayers' money that could have been spent on the Sydney campus." A UNSW representative said 13 students had accepted a place at UNSW Sydney.

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POLITICIZED MEDICAL JOURNAL CONDEMNS AUSTRALIA

Medical journals moving out of their area of competence is folly. And a journal from the home of the ever-decaying "National Health Service" lecturing Australia on its health system really is hilarious. See Matthew 7:3-5

ONE of the world's [once] most respected medical journals, The Lancet, has called for regime change in a once-great country whose health policies are succumbing to "the politics of fear and neglect" and "profound intolerance". Its target? Zimbabwe? Pakistan? Kazakhstan? No, The Lancet was referring to Australia and the Howard Government. In an editorial which might have been ghost-written by Mark Latham in a particularly bilious mood, the journal called upon voters to let shine "a new enlightenment to Australian health and medical science".

Earlier this month its editor Richard Horton visited Sydney. He must have briefed himself on the state of Australian science. The editorial, for instance, quotes "the respected scientist Ian Lowe" on the "extraordinary lengths" that the Government had taken to "silence independent opinion within the research community". Lowe is a respected scientist, but failing to mention his position as president of the Australian Conservation Foundation to Lancet readers is like describing Peter Garrett as a respected rock star, not as a Labor politician and a former president of the ACF.

I don't regard myself as a Coalition supporter, but I am alarmed at this heady mix of politics and medical science. Opposition health spokeswoman Nicola Roxon was a bit hasty in describing the editorial as "a devastating indictment of the Howard Government's record on health". Words like these could create an expectation that within a few months after an election victory enlightened Labor Party researchers will cure the obesity epidemic, the asthma epidemic and the depression epidemic, along with finding a solution to Aboriginal health woes. Unhappily, The Lancet editorial is only the most recent example of a worrying increase in advocacy science in top-flight journals. Traditionally, these luminaries have confined themselves to their areas of expertise. Public policy in areas such as HIV/AIDS or Aboriginal health was discussed in terms of specific programs, not as political huckstering.

But with the election of conservative governments in both the US and Australia, neurons in editorialists' cerebellums started to misfire madly. Not only The Lancet, but also the British Medical Journal and Nature and the US-based New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association and Science have become increasingly hostile towards the George W. Bush administration.

With some reason, of course. The American health system is a mess. The Bush administration has apparently tinkered with official reports, sacked recalcitrant scientists and placed sympathetic officials in key positions. But that's exactly what voters expect politicians to do. When they read newspapers, they hold their noses and measure governments' ever-improving graphs and optimistic forecasts with a bulldust meter.

But not when they read medical and science journals. Like Labor's Roxon, they naively expect that the white-coated gods of science speak truth to power in words uncontaminated by ideological prejudice. No longer. The journals have more or less squarely allied themselves with the liberal side in America's culture wars over abortion rights, therapeutic cloning, sex education, AIDS policies and population control. It has become nearly impossible for dissident scientists to get papers published in these sensitive areas because - they claim - independent opinions are silenced. The new field of stem cell research offers the most egregious example.

Back in 2003, after President George W. Bush had restricted funding for embryo research, the editor of the NEJM, Jeffrey Drazen, vowed to aggressively seek out and publish research on embryonic stem cells. "Physicians and scientists in the US should be at the centre of the action, not on the sidelines," he argued. He dismissed ethical objections.

The other journals, including The Lancet, did much the same, even though they admitted that there were "few tangible clinical benefits to report". The consequences of this ideologically blinkered policy were not long in coming. Science rushed into print two stunning articles about the creation of the world's first human therapeutic clones and stem cell lines. It was a brilliant coup that vindicated its editorial opposition to Bush's ethical and scientific caution.

And it turned out to be the worst fraud of the past hundred years, the handiwork of a publicity-hungry South Korean researcher who knew that Western journals were equally hungry to prove their case. How the editor of Science, Donald Kennedy, responded to this humiliating turn of events is instructive. Like any beleaguered politician, he appointed his mates to an investigating committee: three editors at Science, one former editor at Science, and two of the most passionate advocates of embryonic stem cell science in the US. It was hard to imagine a team less likely to ask tough questions. Had editorial misgivings been steamrollered because of his partisan commitment to embryo research? We will never know.

The real victims of a growth in political advocacy will be the journals themselves. With rising levels of fraud and self-serving commercialism in the ivory towers of academe, the credibility of leading journals is a more valuable asset than ever before. Politicking editorials can only tarnish this. And a habit of playing politics can backfire in unexpected ways. In an entertaining example of holier-than-thou-manship, the British Medical Journal is campaigning to knock The Lancet's halo into a cocked hat. Out of "sisterly concern for a fellow journal", it has called for a boycott because The Lancet's publisher, Reed Elsevier, organises a few fairs for the international arms trade. Richard Horton's explanations have been rather feeble. If The Lancet's friends play games like this, there is little need for the Australian Government to panic over the attack on its own far-from-perfect record.

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The stupidity of a British medical journal

The editor of "The Medical Journal of Australia" comments below on the editorial mentioned above: "Australia: the politics of fear and neglect". Lancet 2007; 369: 1320

From the first days of European settlement, our colonies were bombarded with bureaucratic edicts from the Motherland, until Federation and Australia's emergence as a proud and independent nation put an end to our dependency. But the Motherland's long-lost role was recently revived in an editorial in The Lancet entitled Australia: the politics of fear and neglect. Short, simplistic and sensational, it proclaimed that Australia's progressive and inclusive culture was burdened by a dark underbelly of political conservatism.

It further asserted that the Australian Government had effectively silenced dissent in the scientific community, and propagated a political view "that those who spoke up for indigenous health were simply `establishing politically and morally correct credentials'". To top it off, the Prime Minister was portrayed as ruthlessly exploiting Australia's strong undercurrent of political conservatism.

And The Lancet's solution? Gratuitous advice to oust the conservatives at this year's federal election and usher in a new era of "enlightenment" for Australian health and medical science!

Significantly, the editorial was silent on the concerted efforts of dedicated Australian researchers and doctors working to improve Indigenous health, and the fearless advocacy of this goal by various professional bodies and this Journal. Despite The Lancet's assertion of "silenced" scientists, its editorial was strangely silent on the conservative government's unprecedented investment in health and medical research.

Following The Lancet's edict, a commentary in The Australian warned scientific and medical journals not to engage in politics+ and put their public standing, independence and integrity at risk. As long as there remain unresolved issues in the delivery of health care to all Australians, requiring political attention and action, the MJA will never heed this injunction. But, in pursuit of this goal, the recent edict from London is hardly an example to emulate.

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