With the Federal election imminent and the NSW election early in the new year there must be some disquiet among the corridors of power in Liverpool! With the results of either election the monolith of the Sydney South West Area Health Service is about to be cut down. At least the people of the Southern Highlands will have the satisfaction in knowing that whether the colour of governments changes from red to blue (or remains the same) we will at least have some say in the structure and direction of our local health services.
Whatever the outcome of the elections we in the Highlands will be at last moving forward rather than taking the backward steps imposed upon us by the SSWAHS executive in Liverpool.
You know that you've been in trouble with the local health services and how they were managed when the very people who are meant to manage them cannot even find their way to a town like Bowral. True! One senior manager of one of the clinical streams in SSWAHS missed all those four larger than life RTA signs at the top of Catherine Hill pointing to the off-ramp from the F5 for Bowral and the rest of the Southern Highlands.
While the rest of the SSWAHS creamed off the funding for the health services for the executive staff they imported from the old Central Sydney Area Health Service, and for the machines that go "ping" for the medical and surgical clinical streams, Bowral Hospital was left to the hard work of it's staff and of the local community to raise the funds for the renal dialysis unit and for the refurbishment of the old Children's ward. If the hospital and local area auxiliary groups didn't raise the funds annually for basic equipment in Bowral Hospital we would have never got any clinical machine that went "ping".
The last word of this post is to the CEO and his micro-managing Deputy: the natives of the Southern Highlands are restless and are in revolt (perhaps even revolting) :-)
