A misfiring heart allowed me to personally and directly compare experiences between Shepparton’s GV Health and what benefits patients enjoy in Melbourne’s hospitals.
Yes, chest pains and clammy skin saw me trundled off to GV Health by ambulance a few weeks ago and then, a few days later, to Sunshine Hospital, a part of Melbourne’s Western Health.
As a heart patient admitted through emergency at GV Health, I was given priority treatment, and then, on day two, my bed was wheeled into the Critical Care Ward.
Prior to that, however, I was given what seemed like one-on-one care; although it wasn’t, the nursing staff still moved fluid-like and without fuss from patient to patient.
On the fourth day, I left GV Health, being bundled off to Sunshine Hospital to have a pacemaker installed — a procedure not available at GV Health.
Moving to the Melbourne hospital was a little like shifting between wards — everything looked the same, but it was different.
This is not an exposé on the standard of nursing at the two hospitals, but for a few minor differences, they were fundamentally the same. Both exemplified the best attributes of nursing.
The noted and experienced variations were more about the “hardware” and the technological and physical differences between the two hospitals.
Health care is a frighteningly costly business. While still at Shepparton, a scan was taken of my heart with a portable device that reportedly cost $500,000 and allowed me to remain in bed.
Public health is among a handful of things our governments, state and federal, must prioritise.
Listening in Melbourne to an American economics and public policy professor, Stephanie Kelton, the day before being admitted to GV Health, it became clear our governments could afford free health care for all.
Professor Kelton explained Modern Monetary Theory, and so the only thing standing between us and free health care for all — physical/dental/mental — is the ideology of our politicians and their fragile, and frankly inadequate, understanding of national economics.
Yes, the dollar funding of GV Health is obviously vastly less than that of our big-city cousins. For a simple example, when admitted to the Shepparton facility with heart troubles, I was confined to bed (I could stand beside the bed, but that’s about all) with a mass of leads pinned to my chest by which I was physically linked to a nearby monitor that beeped and blipped all day and night.
At Sunshine Hospital, I had the same array of leads attached to my chest, but they were linked to a small device around my neck that wirelessly and silently (for me at least) conveyed all my vital statistics to a nearby nurses’ station.
What comfort, what freedom — I could easily walk about the ward, visit my only neighbour, go to the loo and talk with those passing in the corridor. It felt like I had been given my life back.
And beyond that, there was a bonus for the nursing staff. At Sunshine Hospital, they each had mobile data recording stations (a wireless computer on wheels), which they took to the patient. Still, in Shepparton, nurses were required to return to their particular ward’s base station to refer to notes or update a patient’s information.
GV Health is a first-class health facility — I’ve used it, and I know — but it could be made even better if our decision-makers had a more powerful understanding of economics and put the care of people ahead of such fanciful matters as our profit-driven, market-orientated extractive ways, which, in an ever-warming world, produce only conflict and social confusion.
Writing in her best-selling book The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy, Stephanie Kelton wrote: “We cannot let words like ‘government borrowing’, ‘debt’ and ‘deficit’ hold us back. With a better understanding of public money— where it comes from and how it works — we can begin to address the intersecting crises that are bearing down on us: economic, health, climate and housing.”
Robert McLean is a former editor of The News.