The hard-hitting Mountain Scene headlines say it all.
For years we’ve hammered home how Southland District Health Board has had Wakatipu blood on its hands by short-changing our healthcare.
Remember Chesney Esdaile, exiled from Lakes District Hospital to die in Cromwell? The 90-year-old war veteran was one of scores of local elderly and dementia patients living their last days far from loved ones.
Recall Natasha Murray, who blamed the death of her unborn child on the lack of even basic maternity care? And Sue Kelly, the widow whose terminally-ill husband gave up on life under threat of eviction from LDH to free up beds?
Now SDHB wants to wash its hands of us and turn over LDH to community control, with GPs running the hospital on a part-privatised basis.
Submissions close tomorrow but those in on Monday or Tuesday will be considered, we understand. You can do a quick-fire questionnaire submission at http://feedback.osdhbs.govt.nz. SDHB’s grand plan is at www.whtrust.co.nz. You’ll find we’re being short-changed on detail. If this is a blueprint for Queenstown healthcare, it’s the most sketchy outline imaginable.
Don’t get sucked in. Make a submission telling SDHB to go back to the drawing board and map out our health future properly – then conduct proper consultation. Right now it’s a Clayton’s Consultation – the kind you have when you don’t really want any.
Local midwives are worried about a deafening silence from Southland District Health Board on the future of Queenstown maternity services.
The childbirth assistants are “deeply concerned”, Wakatipu Health Trust’s Maria Cole says.
Some of the 10 local midwives – frightened of recriminations if they speak out directly – have approach-ed her in confidence.
A 21-page report on how SDHB plans to exit the Wakatipu, handing over Lakes District Hospital to a local “board of governance” for part-privatisation by Queenstown GPs, makes no mention of mater-nity services.
“Given the priority of maternity services and the level of community angst about the lack of them, it’s unfathomable there’s no reference to maternity in the consultation document,” Cole says.
The omission has also aroused suspicion among midwives over job security, she adds.
Cole also cites as “a possibility” that SDHB may cut the umbilical cord on local public maternity care altogether, forcing mums to Invercargill or Dunedin for free birthing – or paying to go private to have their children born here.
“[Maternity] may also be contracted out,” Cole says – SDHB boss Brian Rousseau told her months ago that an Auckland provider was keen on a Queenstown contract.
“We’re not aware of any undertakings being made but if any contract’s to be let out, that should be a decision for LDH’s new board of governance,” Cole says.
“My feeling is that SDHB has put maternity services in the too-hard basket and just left it out [of the consultation process].”
Asked why the report ignores maternity services, Rousseau says: “Probably an oversight, to be quite honest.”
The main thrust of the document is to set out “governance structures”, he adds.
During almost a decade of community outrage over SDHB short-changing the Wakatipu, maternity services and elderly-care facilities have most frequently hogged the headlines.
As Cole points out, the SDHB proposal has comprehensive references to the latter.
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