By Charlene Gatt
MOST people would not consider $80 million a shoestring budget.
But when you’re trying to get the best preventative medical treatment money can buy, that figure is just a drop in the ocean.
In week four of Star’s Help Our Hospital campaign, we chat to Director of Medical Services Dr Ian Kronberg about the measures Western Hospital is taking to address chronic illness in the West.
The hospital has established a range of services, including a GP Liaison program to work more closely with local doctors, a Hospital Admission Risk Program to work with patients who are frequently admitted with the same health complaints, a preventative renal disease program and programs for people with obesity and Hepatitis B and C.
Most recently the hospital introduced a new diabetes foot service, which aims to reduce the number of foots amputations by a third.
Funding for the programs comes from a range of areas, including government grants, drug companies and fundraising.
The problem is that there’s never enough, and the hospital can’t address everything it wants to.
Dr Kronberg admitted to getting frustrated when speaking to doctors at other hospitals.
“If you look at the number of patients we treat, and you look at the numbers other hospitals treat, we treat slightly more patients overall with a third less staff,” he said.
“One of the problems is that we’ve always been a thin hospital.
“We just don’t have the secretaries and the office space that we should have, so when it comes to sitting down and having resources to write grants… we can’t afford it A, in terms of money, and B, in terms of resources.
“We’ve always been part of other people’s networks, we’ve never got the primary resources to build the infrastructure we need to run forward.
“If you look at The Alfred and the amount of resources they’ve got through their research institute… they can initiate projects and show it’s successful and then go to the departments and say ‘will you fund us for this, because we’ve shown this works?’ and we’ve got to try and do all that on a shoestring budget.”
Dr Kronberg told Star the hospital had a strategic plan to prioritise what areas of health they should focus on.
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