Fix the health crisis – NSW Socialists

We are told that we live in a ‘lucky country’ where a green and yellow medicare card is the only thing you need to access the best healthcare in the world. In reality every day working class people are forced to pay out of pocket expenses to stay healthy, forced to decide between making rent or visiting the specialist and faced with a NSW Health system at breaking point.

Our public hospitals are at crisis point on every front; a workforce which is underpaid and burned out; bedblocked hospitals forced to deal with the cascading impacts of a lack of aged care, mental health and palliative care, and buildings which are crumbling around them. At the same time Labor and Liberal governments have undermined the public sector by encouraging the expansion of private for-profit healthcare. Governments claim private health insurance eases the burden on public hospitals, the reality the creation of a two-tier elite system where those who can pay get fast-tracked for "elective" care while the public system picks up the slack for private hospitals.

We’ve seen the devastating impact of the privatisation of hospitals with the case of the Northern Beaches Hospital. Northern Beaches was only taken back into public-ownership and management after the tragic death of two-year old Joe Massa. Health workers are forced to take on the burden and moral hazard of watching health services fall apart, with severe delays and acute understaffing leading to totally preventable deaths. In response to severe PTSD and other mental health impacts on health workers, Chris Minns has attempted to make it harder to access compensation schemes.

NSW is a world leading hub for medical research, this research should be used to make our communities healthy and happy rather than lining the pockets of multinational firms and restricting access based on income.

No one should be bankrupted by medical bills. Your quality of healthcare should not be determined by your postcode, your bank balance or your citizenship status. We’ll fight for a genuinely universal and fully funded healthcare system where everyone gets quality treatment at every stage of life and the workers who make the health system run are valued.

We’ll fight for

Increase funding to public hospitals

Fully fund a universal healthcare system. Abolish all up-front costs for hospital, medical centre, pathology, GP visits, and specialist consultations regardless of citizenship status.
Immediately increase the wages of healthcare workers by implementing at a minimum the full demands of the NSW Nurses and Midwives and the full demands of the Australian Salaried Medical Officer’s Federation with backpay.
Ditch the inadequate “safe staffing levels” and instead introduce the patient to nurse and midwife ratios demanded by the NSW Nurses and Midwives association. 1:3 in ED, 1:4 on wards, 1:1 in birthing, 1:3 in postnatal and minimum of 3 nurses on every shift. Properly enforce the ratios and empower workers to trigger reviews into workloads. This includes eliminating loopholes like including non specialist staff in numbers.
Hire ten thousand more nurses and midwives to meet the ratios demanded by workers.
Hire thousands more doctors, paramedics and support staff to fix the crisis in NSW Health.
Hire two thousand additional paramedics to fix the crisis in ramping, roster gaps and staff burnout.
Substantially increase training positions across all professions in the sector to allow for a transition to a 32-hour working week with no loss of pay. Pay trainee nurses, medical students, paramedics and other health workers a full entry level wage while on placement.
Boost the number of public hospital beds to at least 3 per 1,000 people in NSW.
End public-private partnerships and bring privatised hospitals such as Newcastle's Mater back into public hands.
End outsourcing and bring privatised government health services, such as pathology into public hands.
End bed blocking through a whole community approach to healthcare. This includes a mass expansion of government provided and run aged care facilities and at-home care. Expanding and improving access to rehabilitation and mental health services as well as increasing paramedic numbers.
Expand the ambulance fleet to reduce wait times.
Fully fund at-home care where medically appropriate and beneficial to the patient’s wellbeing.
Ban all use of AI for approving medical, aged care or NDIS claims. Implementation of AI or other technology for genuinely socially useful functions like reviewing MRI scans can only be used as an aid to human labour, not used to replace human labour or human oversight.
Legalise the right for health workers to blow the whistle on the crisis in healthcare. Health workers should not be penalised for standing up for their colleagues and patients.
Overturn the APRA adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism. APRA should not be used to silence healthcare workers speaking out against genocide.
Establish a government owned pharmaceutical firm which researches and produces generic medicines without regard to patenting laws, providing all medicines to NSW residents without charge.