Tasmania’s premier and the state doctors say the state's public hospitals are bearing the brunt of budget shortfalls across the health system and it's the federal government that's to blame. Elderly people waiting for aged care packages and others waiting for NDIS support, are stranded in our hospital beds that others desperately need.
00:00Laura Caldwell spent six days in the emergency medical unit at the Royal Hobart Hospital.
00:08I genuinely feel for the nurses in the Royal. They just are so understaffed and so exhausted and you could just see it in their face.
00:19But unhappy with stretched services, she moved to a private hospital.
00:24The state's peak medical body says Tasmania's hospital system is at capacity and in desperate need of more funding.
00:31At the moment our system is so stretched, there's no recoil in the system, there's no bounce back, there's no elasticity because we don't have any capacity to surge. We are running at capacity.
00:41The states say their health and aged care systems are severely underfunded. It's a cycle. Older patients stuck in hospital because aged care support isn't available.
00:52While others urgently needing hospital beds can't get them.
00:55At the present time we have over 90 people stranded within our hospital system waiting for placement when it comes to aged care or NDIS. This is not good enough.
01:08Doctors joined Premier Jeremy Rockliffe today to push for more hospital funding.
01:13States are still negotiating with the Commonwealth over a 2023 funding deal.
01:18The Premier says the latest offer from Canberra doesn't go far enough.
01:22What it means actually in the federal government reneging on that commitment is $673 million less for health over the course of the next five years.
01:35Six hundred and seventy plus million dollars is a hole that we just can't afford to cover.
01:39The Commonwealth says hospital funding for Tasmania is up 14% this year and insists its latest offer is fair.
01:47The fight isn't over. It's likely to be back on the table at next month's Health Minister's meeting in Brisbane.
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