Have they learned?

Southern hospitals have a bad case of bed-block:

Southerners who have already endured more than 21 months’ delay receiving an operation are being placed back on waiting lists due to bed block.

Unless the issue was taken seriously and tackled urgently, the problem would continue unabated, Southern District Health Board chief executive Chris Fleming said in a report to be considered by the board tomorrow.

“The impact of these challenges is added burden of stress on our staff, potential harm for patients, and cancellation of planned patients due to lack of resourced beds.

“This must change, and we need to have a very clear focus on this with urgency.” . . 

The problem isn’t new, nor is it confined to the south.

For several months the SDHB has being try to manage high hospital occupancy, a phenomenon also noted by many other hospitals around the country.

DHBs are still trying to find the cause of the problem, but suspect it may be because patients who would normally have been treated during Covid-19 lockdown were now being admitted to hospital more seriously ill than they were beforehand, and needing longer treatment time for more complex conditions.

The patients who were now missing out on operations were among those who had waited the longest for surgery, Mr Fleming said. . . 

We know how many people contracted Covid-19 and how many died. We will probably never know how many people had deteriorating health and quality of life, had to wait longer for treatment and how many died sooner than they would have had they been treated earlier.

It didn’t need to be this bad.

When the country first locked down, closing all hospitals for all but the most urgent cases was prudent.

Nobody knew what would happen and experience overseas showed how quickly hospitals could be overwhelmed by patients with Covid-19.

But once it was obvious that the disease had peaked and numbers contracting it were declining, why couldn’t some hospitals have been left to deal with Covid patients while the rest got on with treating other patients?

That this didn’t happen during the first lockdown might was bad enough, that it didn’t happen when Auckland was locked down a second time showed the government hadn’t learned from earlier mistakes.

The shortcomings that led to the most recent community case and ineptitude in handling it shows failure to learn isn’t confined to hospital policy and that is eroding trust.

. . . Any new outbreak will have major health, economic and social costs. But there will also be another significant casualty.

Until now, politicians and public health officials have been able to draw on their social capital, the trust they have earned. But that trust is conditional.

If leaders are seen as failing to act and letting foreseeable failures happen, that has the potential to seriously weaken the collective support and compliance that is absolutely pivotal for current public health measures.

The changing narrative from front of the queue for vaccines to prevaricating over when they’ll get there is doing nothing to bolster confidence in government, and ministry, capability that has been eroded by evidence that neither have learned from mistakes.

That is very concerning because without trust and confidence, maintaining compliance will be much harder if, or as is likely, when there’s a need for another lockdown.