Florence Nightingale invented the modern concept of hospitals and nurse training.
The reason mothers in major regions of QLD can't give birth in their hometowns is because of the fact that locals are prevented from having a say in decisions about health services.
40,000 Queensland nurses don’t need 40,000 bureaucrats in Queensland Health to tell us how to run a hospital. We know how. The only thing local hospitals need from QLD Health is funding, and then to be left alone, without bureaucratic meddling.
The QLD Health system originally started with locally run, autonomous hospitals.
There was very little Brisbane bureaucracy in that system, a fact which does not suit the tribal network made up of ALP politicians, the bureaucrats, and the QNMU.
The current system does not exist for the benefit of patients and the public, or the frontline healthcare workers, but for the benefit of the tribal network - politicians, bureaucrats and unions..
The system of a massive, centralised health bureaucracy is bloated with excessive numbers of administrators created to benefit the tribal network in Brisbane.
For every 10 nurses in France, their health system has 1 administrator.
For every 10 nurses in Queensland, our health system has at least 5 administrators.
You can’t have adequate numbers of professional well paid nurses and a massive bureaucracy.
You have to choose one or the other. If you insist on a massive bureaucracy, nurses will be underpaid, overworked and bullied.
The only solution is to minimise the bureaucracy.
The only way to minimise the Brisbane bureaucracy is to relocate their functions of administration to the local hospitals, employing locals, where local common sense will discover barely 4000 administrators are needed to do the same work as 40,000 Brisbane bureaucrats.
Kingaroy Hospital has 400 nurses. Kingaroy Hospital does not need 400 administrators. 40 or even 50 locals could easily and efficiently administer Kingaroy Hospital.
Don’t believe any politician that promises they can reduce the numbers of Brisbane bureaucrats or make them more efficient without making local hospitals genuinely autonomous. ‘Tell em they're dreamin”
The politicians' mythical solution to the problems of centralised health administration was to make the administration regional. But when that doesn’t work, the solution they switch to is centralisation again, and around and around. “Forgive them Lord for they are but politicians”
Let’s make our local hospital autonomous, with an elected board, run by nurses.
This is the way to end the cover-ups and ensure that our hospital provides the services that our community needs, rather than what the bureaucrats and politicians dictate.
We propose a three-part solution to achieve this goal.
Part 1: A Community Elected Board
We're all aware that QLD Health is struggling with deep systemic issues. The current bureaucratic structure is designed to conceal its numerous failures, with nurses who speak out facing the risk of losing not just their jobs but their entire careers. The most crucial part of the systemic cover up is the board appointment system, which sees local and regional boards appointed by the Minister on the recommendation of the QNMU, with the power to be dismissed by the Minister.
Locked up with Non-Disclosure Agreements, board members end up doing the Minister's bidding. Any dissent results in their removal. The local board saw the ability of local mothers to safely have their babies was under threat and wanted to do something about it. However, they were simply sacked and incredibly made out to be the "scapegoat".
However if the board had been elected by the local community and could not be sacked by the Minister, the full story of the incompetence of the Brisbane bureaucracy in this fiasco would now be known and the local community would be demanding to be able to run their own hospital.
Instead a new Ministerial appointed board are being appointed and nothing will be done to fix the systemic problems. Not good enough.
Part 2: Empowering Nurses in Hospital Decision-Making
The second part of the solution involves empowering the nurses who work within each health facility.
These are the individuals who have first-hand knowledge of the needs and concerns of their patients and their community. By giving these nurses a voice in hospital decision-making, we can ensure that the needs of the community are given top priority.
This can be achieved by having at least one, and possibly two, nurses from each facility elected to serve on the hospital board. For larger facilities, having more nurses on the board can provide a diverse range of perspectives and insights that are critical for making informed decisions that benefit the community.
By doing so, we can work towards creating a healthcare system that is more responsive, accountable, and patient-centred.
Part 3: Nurse-Led Hospital Management
Hospitals are fundamentally centred around nursing, just as aircraft carriers revolve around the risky business of launching and landing planes from their decks. Although carrier fighter pilots are trained for their specific role, they learn nothing about captaining a carrier while in flight.
Similarly, nurses do not acquire significant knowledge about hospital management while caring for their patients. The reality is that unless one has been a carrier pilot or a practising nurse, they cannot fully understand what aircraft carriers or hospitals truly entail.
Hence, only former carrier pilots are permitted to train as Aircraft Carrier Captains, and we believe that only former practising nurses should be able to train to manage hospitals.
In future every hospital CEO will have to have been a former practising nurse.
If you want to help us deliver local nurse-run hospitals for your communities - Sign the Petition
It would never have even occurred to Florence Nightingale that anyone other than a nurse would ever run a hospital.
If you don’t want to spend half your career checking bureaucratic boxes and being bullied by the appointees of nepotism, if you’d like someone fighting on your behalf for locally run, autonomous hospitals, you should join the NPAQ.
