Peel Health Campus has reached critical mass: Pember

According to Mr Pember, PHC hadn’t been subject to a significant upgrade since 2006, with the exception of the addition of a children’s ward, the Sarich Unit, six years ago. 

He said the hospital was designed to care for 30,000 patients a year but it was currently seeing more than 43,000, with numbers expected to swell as the Peel region continues to grow. 

“At the moment the hospital is inadequate and with no plans for any capital upgrades in the next couple of years that's just going to exacerbate the problem and it’s going to make it untenable to work in and to provide services from,” he said.

Mr Pember said the hospital needed a new emergency department triage system to allow patients to be separated according to age, type of injury and urgency, similar to the one used in Rockingham Hospital.

He said patient beds were also insufficient and the hospital’s four operating theatres couldn’t cope with the demand, extending waiting lists and prompting specialists to send patients to other hospitals.

“You need to go to theatre and there’s no beds, how can you operate on someone and where do you put them?" he said.

“That means you can go off to Rockingham or Perth, to Fiona Stanley, that seems to be the word of the day.”

Mr Pember has spoken up about the hospital’s inadequate facilities in a bid to start a conversation between the City of Mandurah and the state government to come up with a plan for the region’s health services.

“It was disappointing that the Reid Review of Metropolitan Hospitals did not include the Avon and Peel Regions and that particularly Peel has also not been fortunate to receive any Royalties for Region funds as part of the Peel Region,” he said.

“I want council to bring the Labor and Liberal parties together so that we come up with a plan very quickly for the Peel region in terms of its health services.”

A PHC spokesperson said the capacity and layout of the hospital’s emergency department and the changing needs of the community provided “operational challenges”. 

But they said emergency department patients were being prioritised by clinical staff who ensured they were taken care of appropriately.

However, a South Metropolitan Health Service (SMHS) spokesperson said funding was sufficient to meet the health care needs of the Peel region until 2023. 

They said SMHS had started a process to review the region’s long-term health care needs but they said no consideration would be given to further developing the hospital until the review was finalised. 

It is not the first time concerns have been raised about the hospital’s ability to cope with the region’s demand.

In August this year, Health Minister Roger Cook revealed the number of doctors at PHC had dropped from 125 in 2016 to 109 in 2017. 

Mr Cook also revealed 15 nurses had resigned since January, with 9.4 full-time registered nurse positions still vacant in the emergency department.

More than a third of the patients were not treated in accordance with the government’s four-hour rule, which requires those attending emergency wards to be treated in less than four hours.