This week, members of our community attended the Eurobodalla Health Service Community Information Session Webinars produced by the SNSWLHD.
The sessions were promoted to inform our community of the plans, progress and development of the new level 4 Eurobodalla Regional Hospital project.
We were euphemistically informed of forward movement and development, all in good time.
It could well have been the last words of dinosaurs as they watched an approaching comet or the grinding of an advancing glacier.
There was no commitment to a new level 4 hospital with Intensive Care, major orthopaedic or paediatric services on opening.
Charles Darwin appreciated the geological time frame for evolution. However, the SNSWLHD and Health Infrastructure advance at their glacial rate without the necessary recruitment measures to establish Intensive Care and paediatric services as they are not obliged to fulfil the commitments of the Eurobodalla Health Service Clinical Services Plan until 2031.
In that ten years, there will have been 3,500 births in the Eurobodalla without adequate newborn or paediatric services.
There is already a 12-18 month waiting time for children for paediatric appointments two hours away in Bega.
There are 4000 more people in the Eurobodalla than the Bega Shire who possess between them 24,000 shoulders, knees and hips that might require major orthopaedic surgery.
There are hundreds of Eurobodalla on the SERH waiting list whose surgery should be performed locally in a new Eurobodalla hospital.
Meanwhile, the Inconvenient Truth of the COVID pandemic hangs like Damocles' sword over the Eurobodalla.
The glaciers are melting.
It is not excusable to hesitate, procrastinate and prevaricate on the provision of level 4 health services in the Eurobodalla.
This week's information sessions were an exercise in explanation in true Yes Minister style.
"Clarification is not to clarify things. It is to put one's self in the clear" Sir Humphrey Appleby.
The responsibility for action on our hospital services stops in St Leonards at the desk of Sir Humphrey Hazzard.
Until next lei
