A NEW medical organisation will provide inpatient and emergency services at the Millicent and District Hospital as of next year, Country Health SA chief executive Maree Geraghty has announced.
Ms Geraghty said a tender process for the provision of medical practitioners at the Mount Gambier Road facility had recently been undertaken following 18 months of locum service.
Bids for the “Millicent and District Hospital and Health Service Medical Practitioner Solution” closed on August 28 after being extended by the State Government by one week.
“A tender has been put out to see if a provider, such as an organsiation, is interested in providing medical services at the hospital in Millicent,” Ms Geraghty said.
“It’s a three year tender so we can actually ensure that we’ve got a constant, high quality medical service we can rely on.
“It’s really about having that continuity of care and being able to provide doctors all the time.
“We’d be hoping to make an announcement about who the provider is within the next month and that provider will hopefully start in January.”
In recent years, doctors from the Medical Clinic Millicent provided services at the local hospital on a “week-on and week-off” basis with Country Health SA locums working there at other times.
In March 2016, the Medical Clinic Millicent said the hospital service provided by doctors had become “unsustainable” due to a number of factors.
Along with staff departures and bureaucratic issues, prohibitive personal circumstances of two senior doctors formerly providing hospital cover resulted in an excessive supervisory load on the two remaining doctors.
While many of the locums who work at Millicent hospital are provided by Australian Medical Placements, other agencies and sometimes individual doctors, also provide doctors to the hospital on occasion.
Ms Geraghty praised the hospital’s doctors on their service provision since local doctors withdrew their contract.
“The current locums that are coming are actually fantastic,” she said.
“The nursing staff have said they have got some great doctors that are visiting the hospital at the moment and are really wonderful to work with and are providing excellent care to their patients.
“One of the major challenges in rural South Australia is the ability to attract and retain doctors to work in country areas and we are certainly focused on that.
“The highest priority of Country Health is looking at how we can build sustainable workforce models and we’re working on that.”
