The cost of a healthcare crisis

The cost of the healthcare crisis

Whilst necessary to highlight the pressure on our health system, we need to find a means of maintaining the public’s trust and confidence.

In my years of working with the AMA, there has rarely been a time in which the word crisis has not been associated with health. I have supported doctors through the catastrophic system collapses which have dominated the news cycle for months. These experiences undermine the trust of the community in both doctors and the hospital system. The fallout from such situations always makes me wary of the way in which we manage and highlight crisis in healthcare because so often – beyond clicks on a newspaper website – there isn’t much that really changes on the ground.  

I have been reflecting on this more recently as our health system faces what feels genuinely like the largest and most significant downturn I have seen. A spiral not just caused by COVID but instead by the collapse of so many aspects of our health system, particularly in the general practice and aged care sectors. I was recently privileged to visit a regional hospital ED. It was a regular weekday afternoon and it felt like a warzone. The exhausted doctors commented on how every day was now a crisis level day with ambulances lined up and patients waiting for care. They observed that it was the impact of two things – the closure of some general practices and the fact that there are no longer aged care beds available to send patients to. Both involved only fairly small events, a few GPs retiring, a few aged care facilities struggling, but the impact was huge. We are hearing this story across rural and regional NSW and increasingly in metropolitan areas. This collapse is not unexpected – I have been hearing the “in five years” projections for some time – but it remains shocking to discover how fragile our health system is. 

The challenge in advocacy comes back to how to get change and highlight this crisis without undermining the trust and confidence of the community. This is even harder in a news cycle that lives on crisis and moves on so fast.

The approach we are taking at the AMA is to tell the stories and to share the experiences of our doctors and of our patients. These stories and experiences are coming back around with so many in the community having a lived experience of the difficulties of accessing healthcare and the crisis coming to their family. It’s not as sensational as the splashing of critical incidents but it is the real, lived experience of what a healthcare crisis really means and why fixing it remains so important.