100 signatures reached
To: Tobi Wilson, Chief Executive South East Sydney Local Health District and the Hon Brad Hazzard, NSW Minister for Health and Medical Research
Stop the cuts to Clinical Engineering at Prince of Wales Hospital!
Technical Officers in the Clinical Engineering Department at Prince of Wales Hospital are the health workers who keep the machines going when you’re having urgent surgery. In an act of absolute penny-pinching, Prince of Wales Hospital management are cutting the resources to this department. These cuts will put patients’ lives at risk. We call on the Health District Chief Executive and the NSW Minister for Health to reverse these cuts.
Why is this important?
The cuts being made will save very little money but are part of a misguided drive to continually cut spending in Public Health. One of the cuts takes 4 hours a day of labour from the Clinical Engineering Department, which will reduce the time the staff have to maintain essential equipment such as Defibrillators, Heart Rate Monitors, Ventilators, Oxygen Saturation Meters, Anaesthetics Machines and other essential hospital equipment. There are thousands of these machines at Prince of Wales Hospital.
Another cut reduces the number of staff on call of an evening. These staff are called in to assist with urgent heart surgery. They must monitor machines such as Balloon Pumps, that help to increase the blood flow to the heart immediately before and after surgery. This limits their capacity to deal with multiple urgent heart operations of an evening. This will put lives at risk.
Stop essential services being run down at this important Public Hospital. Sign the petition now.