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The Australian
25-04-2025
- Health
- The Australian
Australian public hospitals routinely silence whistleblowers
Australia is often described as having a world-class health system. There's no doubt that we do. But in our public hospitals, the pursuit of excellence comes at a price. That price is often invisible to patients; though sometimes the cracks in the system are bleedingly obvious. For patients, the system pressures are manifest in excessive wait times, too speedy discharge, or for the very unlucky, lives ebbing away in the back of a ramped ambulance. The trends are accelerating. On a widespread basis, doctors have had enough. They are overburdened, despondent and scared. The Australian this week launched an investigative series, which we have dubbed Life Support, to explore what is driving the huge pressures on Australian public hospitals. What is at stake is not only clinicians' welfare as public health systems teeter on the brink. Also at stake is patients' health – and their lives too. In England, the Starmer Labour government has moved to dismantle the National Health Service's administrative body, NHS England, which manages health services across the country, slashing the jobs of half of the agency's workforce. NHS England is a body tasked with doling out money to the NHS's network of hospitals and primary care clinics according to executive instructions. For the past 15 years, it's been given a large degree of latitude and independence, but it came at a cost of increasing duplication and bureaucracy. Patient safety scandals have been documented with alarming regularity. Current or former staff in public hospitals or patients can contact Natasha Robinson by email at robinsonn@ or by Proton Mail at health_editor_australian Though Australia's federation has no equivalent of England's nationalised health service, with devolved management of hospitals in most states, doctors working in Australia's public system believe many of the ills of the NHS are also present here, especially in terms of workplace culture and interrelated threats to patient safety. There comes a point when clinicians can no longer live with themselves when forced to work in unsafe systems. It's become clear to many doctors and nurses in public hospitals across Australia over the past decade that changing systems from the inside is next to impossible. Increasingly, they refuse to stay silent. 'This is a volcano which may well erupt,' says Dr Deborah Yates, who worked in public hospitals in Sydney for 25 years before abandoning ship, broken and grief-stricken, after treating the disadvantaged for decades. The recent psychiatry dispute in NSW, in which half the workforce of staff specialists handed in their resignations, was a harbinger of just how fed up many sections of the public sector workforce are. That was followed in NSW by a three-day strike by doctors across the gamut of specialties – something that hasn't occurred in the state in more than three decades. But it's not just a NSW trend. Governments and administrators in all states are doing their best to keep the real state of public hospital breakdown hidden. They routinely attempt to silence the doctors and nurses who seek to expose it. In Adelaide just a few weeks ago, senior emergency doctor Megan Brooks took the difficult decision to stare down SA Health's attempts to silence her through its code of ethics and give evidence to a coroner about the severe state of ambulance ramping at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. In Perth, it was frontline doctors who wore the blame for the July 2024 death of three-year-old Aliyah Yugovich, who was wrongly given an anti-seizure drug before dying of the flu. Accountability up the chain has been minimal. The Australian next week will reveal a similar case of a doctor being silenced over a serious threat to patient safety in Queensland. As a reporter, unpacking these matters, which are always complex but also have system-wide drivers, is difficult. There's always the sense that however huge the iceberg, public reporting may never be enough to trigger a new direction for a ship as big as the public health system. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Read related topics: HealthStress
New European
09-04-2025
- Health
- New European
Isabel Oakeshott's crash course in Israeli healthcare
The Talk correspondent, partner of Reform deputy leader Richard Tice and resident of Dubai, was in Israel 'to learn more about war and how it might eventually end'. Then, as she was cruising along Tel Aviv's beach promenade at 15mph, the wind whipped her cap off and she ended up in trouble. A moment's thought, please, for Isabel Oakeshott, who has done herself a mischief while doing the entirely normal thing for a 50-year-old of riding an e-scooter in a baseball cap. 'Perhaps I hit a bump as I turned to look at my disappearing hat, or just somehow lost my balance,' she wrote in the Daily Telegraph. 'Either way, I flew over the handlebars, landing hard. While my jaw and chin hit the pavement, the rest of me smacked onto the scooter's jack-knifed chassis. 'And so it was that I found myself at the Sylvan Adams Emergency Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility designed to deal with casualties of war. When air raid sirens sound and locals take cover in bomb shelters, doctors and nurses at this hospital continue their work underground. It is all set up for electricity blackouts and flying missiles.' And guess what Oakeshott's very brief ('By 10pm I was back in my hotel room… I had been at the hospital for less than two hours') experience of Israel's healthcare system taught her? Yes – that she'd been right all along about how terrible the NHS is! Oakeshott is the co-author, along with former Tory deputy chair Michael Ashcroft, of Life Support, a 480-page romp through the NHS's failings, and happily her 120 minutes in a Tel Aviv hospital was enough to confirm all her prejudices. 'The accident shifted my focus onto Israel's widely admired healthcare system,' she writes. 'The contrast with the NHS was too glaring to ignore… Based on mandatory health insurance with not-for-profit providers, Israel's health system is means-tested but universal, ensuring even the poorest citizens are covered.' Are they, though? A 2023 study by the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research found that more than one million Israelis – 12 per cent of the entire population – had to forgo medical services in 2021 or 2022 because they couldn't afford the contributions despite being insured. The rates were especially high among women, the poor and people with chronic illnesses. 35 per cent said they gave up on doing medical tests or treatments through the health maintenance organisations because of long wait times. Of those, 51 per cent resorted to private medicine, which is even more expensive. And earlier this year, writers of a report by the Taub Centre for Social Policy Studies were critical of the investment into the country's health services. In 2023, Israel's per capita current health expenditure, in terms of purchasing power parity, was lower than that of most OECD countries. This expenditure has since decreased by a further 0.9% in the past two years, with only South Korea, Portugal, Greece, Chile, and Mexico ranking lower in health spending. Prof Nadav Davidovitch, who heads Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's School of Public Health and who co-led the study, compared Israel's healthcare system to an Eastern European folktale of a workhorse. 'The owner is happy the horse works so hard, so he gradually reduces the horse's food, and then he's so happy that the horse continues to work,' he said. 'Until, finally, the horse is dead.' Even Oakeshott saw the problems with her comparison of two healthcare systems, fleetingly conceding that 'Israel is a fraction of the size of the UK, with very different demographics'. But no matter – she may have gone to learn more about war, but left with a replacement for the NHS. Incidentally, she was treated by 'a cheerful Polish surgeon with excellent English'. Her allies didn't seem so keen on these when campaigning for the hardest possible Brexit!
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Madison Beer Grabs Attention With Her Red Carpet Photo
Madison Beer had everyone seeing blue on Saturday evening in California. The 26-year-old singer and influencer, who has close to 40 million followers on Instagram, recently went viral for her outfit at the 2025 Billboard Women in Music Awards at the YouTube Theater on March 29 in Inglewood, California. Beer, who first went viral when she was a teenager, first gained notoriety when she published covers to songs by Justin Bieber and Adele. The New York native released her debut album, "Life Support," in 2021. She later released her 2023 album, "Silence Between Songs," in 2023. Both of Beer's albums landed on the Billboard Top 200. She's gone on tour internationally, too, while building up a massive fan base on social media. This weekend, Beer turned heads with her sizzling red carpet - well, the carpet was actually blue, matching her dress - photo on Saturday night. It's safe to say that Beer's fan base were big fans of her dress on Saturday evening. "Holy cow, i'm flabbergasted... she is so stunning !!!" one fan wrote. "She looks incredible," one fan added. "Looking absolutely gorgeous!!!!!!!" another fan wrote. "SHES INSANE," one fan added. Beer has posted some emotional messages following her concert stops, too. "A feeling that is hard to put into words - thank you forever and ever australia , this was a dream come true. < 3 i love you endlessly….. it was an honor to finally meet u <3333 i couldn't believe my eyes while looking out at you all. thank you from the bottom of my heart < 3 < 3," she wrote after leaving Australia. Beer, 26, is very much on the rise moving forward.
