A SOUTH East health chief has ruled out locating a general practitioner clinic at the Mount Gambier Hospital to ease pressure on its emergency department.
This comes as new figures show more than 19,000 people attended the emergency department in the last financial year.
The GP clinic was mooted by Grant District Mayor Richard Sage at a recent council meeting given it could reduce costs to the hospital and speed up throughput in the emergency department.
Revelations also emerged at the meeting the Mount Gambier Hospital was billed for every Royal Flying Doctor medical transfer to Adelaide, which was a significant hit to its annual budget.
Country Health SA regional director Jayne Downs said she did not support the idea of a GP clinic at the hospital despite pressure at times on its emergency department.
“I firmly believe it would be a very fine line to walk if we had a genuine GP clinic sitting there,” she said.
“Which clinic gets to be the swinging door?” Ms Downs said.
She also argued the hospital would be in direct competition with various medical clinics in Mount Gambier.
“I struggle with providing the service that is in competition with the private practices,” said Ms Downs, who explained some clinics provided a “reasonable” amount of out-of-hour services.
Ms Downs revealed the hospital was continuing to work towards adopting the 22 recommendations handed down in an independent review, but its efforts were being hamstrung by recruitment issues.
“It is a tricky piece of work because recruitment is a big part of it – we did get extra funding to get an additional doctor shift in the emergency department and in the wards – but we haven’t been able to recruit successfully for those yet,” the regional health leader said.
“But I want to reassure you these aren’t vacancies with no one sitting in them – we are utilising the contractual or locum workforce to make sure all of our rosters are covered.
“If you come into the emergency department or the hospital, you won’t find there is a half a team here, one there and a gap there.”
Ms Downs said six out of the 22 recommendations had been finalised and a number were “near completion”.
“We have a lot of enabling or underpinning work going on in terms of the review,” she said.
“We very much need to continue with the recruitment.”
She said the review reinforced how important it was to fill vacancies.
“We are recruiting resident medical officers who work in the emergency department where we need a good range of seniority and room for some junior doctors where they can learn and be supervised,” Ms Downs said.
“As successful as we can be in recruitment, we always find there will be some staff coming in and some moving on.”
She said the review recommended the hospital consider how some metropolitan hospitals recruited.
A more “senior” doctor classification has been created to try and lure more experienced doctors.
Ms Downs also revealed the hospital was now receiving more compliments than complaints.
