Some safety problems in Sydney’s Troubled Northern Beaches Hospital have not been tackled properly, according to a damn report from the NSW auditor general.
The Auditor General Bola Oyetunji report showed that the hospital was not effectively the best health services and clinical results for the community.
It also discovered that the hospital was not well integrated into the local health district and the network, which influenced patients in the area.
Northern Beaches Hospital is managed by private operator Healthscope in a public-private partnership with the NSW government.
The NSW auditor general has released the report in the hospital today. ((ABC News))
The government of Minns introduced legislation last month to ban all future public-private partnerships with acute care after the death of a toddler last year who was treated in the Northern Beaches Hospital.
The report stipulated that there was a risk that the government would have to take responsibility for the hospital earlier than 2038, when the current contract ends.
Toddler died after being treated in the hospital
Toddler Joe Massa died in the Sydney Children’s Hospital after he was treated in the Northern Beaches Hospital. ((Delivered))
The report showed that the hospital did not tackle the safety risks with its electronic record system, which was known since the hospital was opened in 2018.
“The Northern Beaches Hospital has registered with regard to results for some complications acquired in the hospital and has taken insufficient actions to tackle some identified clinical security risks,” the report said.
It said that the risk was realized during a serious side effects in September 2024, a reference to the death of Toddler Joe Massa after he had been traced incorrectly after presenting the Emergency Department.
The two years old was held two and a half hours on a bed, despite a dangerously high heartbeat and a serious loss of liquid.
An internal investigation found serious failures by the management of the hospital, including Joe wrongly as a less serious patient category and not responding to requests from his parents to give him IV liquids.
He was transferred to the Sydney Children’s Hospital in Randwick after a cardiac arrest, where he died due to brain damage.
In February Harper Atkinson was born on non -repeating, almost an hour after an obstetrician declared an immediate threat to the life of the mother or baby in the hospital.
The baby died a day after an operating theater was not ready for the mother, Leah Pitman, because it trusted an on-call system on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening.
Healthscope has said that his call system meets all NSW Health and College of Obstetricians guidelines.
The report showed that although the hospital performs better than the emergency departments of similar hospitals and elective surgery indicators, it had not always achieved his contractual goals and had registered increased fall prices and birth trauma.
Harper Atkinson was no longer responded in February. ((ABC News: Shaun Kingma))
Hospital can return to public control
The report also showed that Healthscope approached the state government in November 2023, to return the public part to the State, referring to insufficient financing, poor integration within the broader health network and tense stakeholders relationships.
The government rejected the proposal in January 2024.
After the government’s prohibition on public-private partnership hospitals last month, Healthscope said that it was willing to talk about the hospital’s handing over to the public control and said that the model was “no longer compatible” with the objectives of the state government.
Minister of Health Ryan Park has defended a decision to reject the previous request and said that a Task Force would investigate the last request.
“The taxpayers of NSW would have been hundreds of millions of dollars from their own pocket,” said Park.
Government to accept the report recommendations
The report made three recommendations, including the hospital in December 2025 solving safety and quality problems.
It has encouraged the state government to consider whether the public-private model was suitable for the delivery of health care, and said that the operational model has created tension between commercial and clinical results.
Mr Park said that the government would fully accept report recommendations.
“It sketches and exposes the problem with the privatization of public hospital services here in New South Wales,” said Mr. Park.
Ryan Park (Left) says that the government will fully accept report recommendations. ((ABC News: Danuta Kozaki))
In a statement, Healthscope said that it agreed that the contractual regulations with the NSW government that underlie the operation of the hospital were “seriously challenged”.
Healthscope rejected some of the findings, including that it had limited visibility about small damage or near-miss incidents.
During a press conference prior to the release of the report, Prime Minister Chris Minns said that the government was concerned about the privatization of essential services.
“If you have a sick family member, if you have someone who is injured, the last thing you want to think about is dollars and penny or the spreadsheet or a balance,” the prime minister said.
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