Well it would appear to Socrates that the claws of the SSWAHS Empire are out and unsheathed when it comes to their last outpost - Bowral.
For years, the health services in the Wingecarribee have struggled to improve the hospital and community based services to the local population. Specialist surgeons are not the only ones feeling the sharpness of the SSWAHS pruning knife. How many clinical and administrative positions in the Bowral Hospital are piggy-backed onto the roles of other positions? How many staff have more than the one role within the health system?
The Community Health Centre in Bowral said farewell to its hardworking (and only) Women's Health Nurse earlier this year. To date - not replaced or even advertised. Why? No doubt the position will become a shared position with the SSWAHS Macarthur health services.
The full time Sexual Assault Worker in Bowral was reassigned to the Macarthur Sexual Assault Team. That worker has great difficulty in managing the crises of sexual assault within the Southern Highlands because of the competing demands from the Macarthur service.
The full time Aboriginal Mental Health Worker position in the Wingecarribee was made vacant by the resignation of the staff member earlier this year. The replacement Aboriginal Mental Health Worker is now a position shared with the SSWAHS Macarthur health service.
The full time Bowral Mental Health Welfare worker who had been "loaned" to the Wollondilly Community Health Centre for one day a week to help them out temporarily seems to have gone into a permanent work program there, thereby denying fulltime services to patients in the Wingecarribee.
The Clinical Nurse Consultant at the Bowral Community Health Centre responsible for managing and monitoring wound care of patients discharged from the Bowral Hospital was successful in gaining an after hours Nurse Manager position at the Bowral Hospital. The community nursing staff (and the general practitioners of the Southern Highlands) are still waiting for SSWAHS to advertise that vacant clinical position. The thinking is that SSWAHS will also see this as a shared position with their Macarthur health services.
To add salt to the wounds of the people of the Southern Highlands, so to speak, SSWAHS Executive has also approved the "lending" of the Bowral Community Nurses to fill the vacant positions of their Community Nurses at the Macarthur health service's Rosemeadow facility. Our Bowral Community Nurses are already over-stretched in performing their current home nursing loads within the Southern Highlands without having to try and prop up the Macarthur services.
SSWAHS as we know it is in a terminal state. The unfortunate outcome for the people of the Southern Highlands is that all that has been done in the past to deliver the best possible health service to the local area is now being bled dry to prop up the carcase of an Area Health Service in terminal decline.
