Australian Politics
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Wife’s battle for Redland Hospital MRI after husband put on six-day wait list for crucial scan
This is the sort of bureaucratic nonsense you have got to expect of Qld Health. Note that non-urgent MRI scans were routinely and promptly referred to Cleveland X-Ray, just across the road from where the guy was, but because he was classed as urgent he couldn't be sent there. So he had to wait days for a scan. Being classed as urgent DELAYED his care. That's bureaucratic logic for you
I am fortunate to be able to go private for all my medical care so I get scans as quickly as the day I ask for one. Note that what priviliges me is NOT the availability of better facilities. The guy below could also have had prompt treatment except for the rigidy and buck-passing of the public health bureaucracy. What gives me better care is that I bypass the wooden heads of an uncaring government bureaucracy
A bayside woman has started an online crusade to get an MRI machine for a busy regional hospital after her husband spent an agonising week waiting for a crucial scan.
Capalaba’s Kirra Conlon started a petition calling for the scanner for Redland Hospital where her husband Matthew, 38, was bedridden after a catastrophic migraine left him unable to walk, speak or function properly.
Mr Conlon spent six days lying in a ward before his distressed family took action and invoked a Queensland law known as Ryan’s Rule to get him a scan appointment at another hospital.
Mr Conlon was initially rushed to Princess Alexandra Hospital on January 30 after suffering a debilitating headache, stroke-like symptoms including being unable to speak or move his arms and legs.
However, after a night in the emergency ward without seeing a doctor, Ms Conlon decided to move her husband closer to home and took him to Redland Hospital.
Mr Conlon was admitted to the hospital’s four-bed stroke ward where his paralysis and headache were treated as the side effects of a suspected stroke.
But after six days and partly regaining some mobility in his arms, he was still unable to speak.
Ms Conlon claimed the week-long delay was due to a range of reasons including that the MRI at the Princess Alexandra Hospital was fully booked.
Her husband was also denied admission to PA hospital because its inpatients got preferential treatment, she claimed.
She said a lack of ambulances to transport her husband from Redland to PA or Logan hospitals also delayed his scan.
“My husband’s GP sent out an urgent referral for an MRI to all hospitals and clinics in the region, but that request went nowhere because my husband needed a nurse to go with him because he was incapacitated,” she said.
“Incapacitated patients on the southside are limited to only using MRIs at Logan and PA Hospitals, where there are always line-ups.”
Non-urgent MRI scans were referred to Cleveland X-Ray, across the road.
Under Queensland Health guidelines, MRI scans were scheduled according to clinical need.
A QH spokesman said that could result in varied waiting times.
But doctors were not able to offer Mr Conlon a diagnosis until after he had an MRI scan, Ms Conlon claimed.
She said she started a petition after a week of “sheer hell”.
“There is no MRI machine at Redland, which is a disgrace for a hospital which is supposedly undergoing a $62 million upgrade so it can treat more critically-ill patients,” she said.
“My husband was left lying in a hospital bed for six days and could not access the appropriate treatment from a neurologist or psychologist until he had an MRI.
“It was only after the MRI (which Mr Conlon eventually had at Logan Hospital) that the specialist doctors were then able to give a correct diagnosis and start the proper treatment – which we hope was not too late.
“Even staff at Redland Hospital are going to sign the petition because they also believe that not having an MRI machine on hand is a barrier to providing proper care.”
Ms Conlon said hospital staff had reassured her of an MRI scan at Logan Hospital on Friday, February 2.
However, Mr Conlon was still waiting on Saturday, February 3 when doctors told the couple that the head neurologist had agreed to an MRI and consultation for Monday, February 5.
But the devastated couple were told on Monday, February 5, that the PA MRI was unavailable.
Mr Conlon was finally taken in an ambulance to Logan Hospital on Tuesday, February 6.
A day after having the MRI scan, Mr Conlon was diagnosed with a functional neurological disorder and treatment tailored for his condition began.
Ms Conlon said she was told another patient in the ward was taken to her scan appointment at Logan by taxi under the supervision of a nurse.
***************************************************
Young, woke left hateful new face of anti-Semitism
For years the right-on have been warning about the rise of racism. Beware red-faced white men who moan about mass immigration, they say. Watch out for populist politicians and their witless supporters in the masses, they cry. For it is from within these ranks, from within this army of the unwoke, that fascism is likely to emerge.
Watch out, the 1930s are coming back – that’s been the constant cry of the politically correct these past few years.
And yet when fascist-like language really did re-emerge, it came not from some old white bloke but from a youngish and very left-wing woman. When 1930s-style talk really did rear its ugly head, it wasn’t courtesy of an ageing conservative with a chip on his shoulder about illegal immigration, but a hip politico beloved of the smart set.
I am referring, of course, to Jenny Leong, the Greens MP for the state seat of Newtown in Sydney’s inner west.
This week a video emerged showing Leong speaking at a “pro-Palestine” forum in Sydney in December. What she said at that meeting was genuinely chilling. She raged against the “Jewish lobby”. These people, she said, “rock up to every community event and meeting” to try to make a “connection”.
Then came her killer line, a line that will have sickened everyone who has even the faintest acquaintance with the bleak history of anti-Semitism. They meddle in everything, she said, because they want their “tentacles” to reach into every nook of society in order that they might “influence power”.
There it was. “Tentacles”. The old, obscene vision of the Jewish people as an octopus-like monstrosity straddling the world, interfering everywhere. This is the most racist thing I have heard a mainstream politician say.
Yes, it’s good that Leong has walked back her comments. She now admits the word “tentacles” was “inappropriate”. That’s one way of putting it. I prefer “disgusting”. It has direct echoes of Nazi-era cartoons that likewise showed the Jews with “tentacles” encircling the globe.
Leong’s expression of (half-hearted) regret for her remarks should not detract from what a serious situation this is.
To my mind, for a public figure to speak ominously of Jewish “tentacles” is no better than if a public figure compared black people to monkeys or branded Chinese-heritage people a “yellow peril”. Just imagine if an Aussie politician uttered such vile slurs. There would be uproar from the right-on. That politician would be cancelled into oblivion.
This hasn’t happened for Leong. That the self-styled anti-racists of the woke left just carried on sipping their macchiatos is so revealing. It confirms their staggering double standards. They’ll hit the streets over certain kinds of racism, but turn a blind eye to the world’s oldest racism.
“Jewish tentacles” were a key motif in Nazi propaganda. As Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre says: “The nefarious Jew/octopus was a caricature deployed by Nazis as a staple in their hateful campaign.”
The rehabilitation of this vile image should horrify everyone. And strikingly, it was rehabilitated not by some hard-right loudmouth, but by a self-described anti-racist. Leong is a loud and proud critic of racism. She supports Black Lives Matter. “If you’re sick of us talking about racism, imagine how sick we are of being subjected to it,” she once said.
What is going on here? How do we explain this bizarre phenomenon – what we might call “anti-racist anti-Semitism”?
Leong is not the only “anti-racist” who seems to have a colossal blind spot when it comes to anti-Jewish racism. We’ve seen Black Lives Matter praise Hamas. BLM Chicago even tweeted an image of a Hamas paraglider, celebrating those who flew into Israel on October 7 to carry out the worst slaughter of Jewish men, women and children since the Holocaust.
This week it was revealed an “anti-racist” member of staff at the BBC once tweeted about Jews being “Nazi parasites”. At demonstrations across the West, we’ve seen supposed anti-racists march alongside radical Islamists who holler for “jihad” against the Jewish state. Here in London, posh leftists have chanted in support of the Houthis, the Yemeni movement whose flag literally has the words “Curse the Jews” on it.
And, as violent anti-Semitism has soared, anti-racists have looked the other way. The kind of people who scream at white men with dreadlocks (that’s “cultural appropriation”) and damn those who ask ethnic-minority people where they are from (that’s a “racial microaggression”) have been schtum as synagogues in Europe have been firebombed and even when a man with a knife threatened Jews outside a kosher shop in London recently.
Anti-racists flirting with racism – it feels surreal. But here’s the most troubling thing: it’s more than a blind spot. It’s more than hypocrisy. Rather, the strange spectacle of “anti-racist anti-Semitism” speaks to how rotten the politics of identity has become.
This left-wing ideology dolls itself up as “anti-racist”, but it is the opposite. It doesn’t seek to deliver us into a post-racial world, a la Martin Luther King, where true equality reigns. No, it divides us by our ethnic heritage, separating us into boxes marked “oppressed” or “privileged”.
The “oppressed” get the left’s love, while the “privileged” get their hate. And who’s in the “privileged” box? White men, naturally. Heterosexual men. “Cis” people. And, you guessed it, Jews.
Indeed, in the warped worldview of these racial authoritarians who masquerade as progressive, Jews are the most privileged of all.
A recent Harvard/Harris poll in the US found that 67 per cent of 18-24-year-olds – the woke young – view Jews as an “oppressor class”. This, too, echoes a feverish belief of the 1930s – namely, that Jews love to stomp their oppressive boot on the peoples of the world.
Today, entire ethnic groups are demonised, not by the ranting far right, but by a mainstream left that ruthlessly sorts us into the categories of “good” or “bad”.
Identity politics is the enemy of equality. It is the new means through which Jews in particular are singled out as suspect, branded as wicked. Tackling this bigoted left creed should be the top task of everyone who opposes racism, in all its devious guises.
*************************************************
Vaping out of control in schools, warn principals
School principals are calling for an immediate crackdown on vape sales in shops and online, as the Coalition refuses to back the Albanese government’s plan to confine sales to pharmacies.
At least one in three Australian teenagers has tried vaping, the Cancer Council revealed on Friday when it released a survey showing 93 per cent of parents want vapes banned without a valid prescription.
Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andy Mison called on both sides of politics to back a ban on vape sales.
He said teenage students had sworn at him and threatened to bash him when he confiscated their vapes.
“They’re fixated on getting their next hit, are very disruptive and distracted from learning,’’ he said. “We see the behavioural effects of withdrawal, as kids disappear from the classroom so they can get nicotine hits.
“When you confiscate them, some kids act angrily. I’ve been sworn at, I’ve been threatened with bashings.’’
Mr Mison said manufacturers were targeting children with brightly coloured vapes made to look like highlighter pens.
“The vapes are bright and colourful and clearly designed to attract kids,’’ he said. “They have sweet combinations of flavours like mango and pineapple, and they’re so addictive.
“Kids will be more likely to be using vapes much more frequently than they might have smoked cigarettes.’’
A Senate inquiry into classroom disruption this week identified “strong links between vaping, nicotine withdrawal and classroom disruption’’.
The NSW Primary Principals Association told the inquiry of “increasing evidence of vaping being a problem in primary schools’’. “Vaping should be urgently addressed as a health problem, not a school discipline problem to solve,’’ it said.
Cancer Council chief executive Tanya Buchanan said vapes often contained nicotine and carcinogens such as formaldehyde and metals, which are not declared on the label.
Professor Buchanan said nicotine harms children’s developing brains, affecting the part of the brain that controls attention, learning, moods and impulse control.
“Retailers are still knowingly selling nicotine-containing vapes in local shops near schools, with enticing displays of lollies lining the entrance, attracting the attention of young people,’’ she said.
“Without the Parliament’s support for the federal government’s upcoming reforms, purchasing e-cigarettes will remain alarmingly common and easy for young people.’’
Retailers are banned from selling vapes to children, but enforcement is lax.
The Albanese government banned the importation of single-use vapes on January 1, but retailers are allowed to sell any vapes they have in stock to adults.
The government plans to introduce legislation this month to limit the sale of vapes to pharmacies, with a prescription, for use by smokers trying to quit.
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler called on the opposition to back Australia’s “world-leading vaping reforms’’.
“Once the legislation passes the parliament later this year the only legal way to buy vapes will be therapeutically, through a pharmacy,’’ he said.
The federal opposition refused to commit to the reform, with Nationals leader David Littleproud insisting that retailers be allowed to sell vapes to adults without a prescription.
Mr Littleproud – whose party has received donations from tobacco companies – refused to say if he would support the ban on vape sales in shops.
“We need to protect children from vaping and crack down on the uncontrolled black market,’’ he said.
“The Nationals support a process to develop a comprehensive regulatory framework for e-cigarettes to keep them out of the hands of children.
“We believe that regulating e-cigarettes is also crucial to weakening the illicit black market.’’
The federal Opposition’s education spokeswoman, Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson, said that vaping in schools was “rampant and educators need every possible support to combat this scourge’’.
“With over a quarter of young people aged 14 to 17 admitting to having tried or regularly use vapes, Australian schools need tough action from this government to prevent vaping spiralling out of control,’’ she said.
***************************************************
NSW to Introduce Legislation to Ban OFFSHORE Oil and Gas Exploration
One wonders why offshore drilling is singled out and why both parties support that. I guess the oceans have an image as pristine. They are more accurately seen as a biological soup. They teem with both life and pollution
On Feb. 6, the state Labor government announced that it would introduce a new piece of legislation to amend the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979.
Under the changes, all sea bed petroleum and mineral exploration and recovery activities in the state’s coastal waters will be banned.
In addition, the bill will make it impossible for energy companies to carry out other developments related to offshore oil and gas exploration (such as pipelines) within the state.
The NSW government cited the risks of “major environmental disasters” such as oil spills, as well as greenhouse gas emissions associated with petroleum extraction as the main reasons for introducing the legislation.
“The NSW government’s bill is designed to prevent the severe environmental impacts that can result from offshore exploration and recovery of petroleum and minerals,” it said.
Nevertheless, the exploration ban will not apply to activities that the state government deems beneficial to the environment, including the recovery of sand for beach nourishment or beach scraping to help protect against erosion.
Similarly, dredging activities for purposes such as removing sediments or pollutants, and laying pipelines or submarine cables will also not be subject to the ban.
NSW Climate Change and Environment Minister Penny Sharpe believed the new legislation was the right move by the government.
“We know an overwhelming majority of people in NSW do not support offshore mining. The passage of this bill will give certainty that our government is prioritising environmental protection and our own local interests,” she said.
“This bill is a sensible amendment to our legislation to protect NSW against the risks of offshore mining.”
Echoing the sentiment, NSW Central Coast Minister David Harris said local communities would be better off under the new bill.
“This is about providing communities with certainty that is in the best interest of NSW as well as protecting the NSW coastal waters and marine environments,” he said.
State Opposition to Support the Bill
It is expected that the bill will receive support from the state opposition, which introduced a similar bill in June 2023.
While Shadow Environment Minister Kellie Sloane welcomed the announcement, she questioned why the state Labor government did not take action earlier.
“Pleased to see that Labor has finally seen the light when it comes to protecting NSW coastal waters—and has agreed to legislate Liberals and Nationals policy to stop offshore drilling of oil and gas,” she said on social media.
“I’m not sure why they didn’t just do this 7 months ago when the Coalition introduced.”
Despite the looming prospect of a total ban, some energy producers have expressed the intention to continue their exploration activities.
On Feb. 6, Advent Energy Executive Director David Breeze stated that his company would maintain its commitment to exploring and securing gas resources in the Commonwealth waters under the Petroleum Exploration Permit 11 (PEP-11).
“Numerous reports show that NSW faces a gas supply shortfall within the next four years,” he said, as reported by ABC News.
“PEP-11 has the possibility of supplying NSW with the bulk of its gas needs for 20 years.”
Meanwhile, Samantha McCulloch, the CEO of the Australian Energy Producers, a peak industry body, criticised the new legislation, saying it ignored the critical role of gas under the net zero transition and the importance of new gas supply in ensuring energy security and reducing pressures on prices.
“Report after report from independent agencies such as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Energy Market Operator have warned of approaching supply shortfalls and identified the need for new east coast gas supply–especially in NSW and Victoria,” she told The Epoch Times.
“Blanket bans unnecessarily limit sources of gas when existing regulations provide an appropriate framework to determine conditions for exploration and development.”
************************************
Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
***************************************
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Evelyn Rae, a 
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related
No comments:
Post a Comment