An Unhealthy Bureaucracy

To the uninitiated. This is a “Patient Care Board.” There is one adjacent to every hospital bed in NSW. In 2017-2018, there were 61,647 hospital beds in Australia. How many of those are in NSW is hard to tell. After lengthy research I found a very concise report: 

https://www1.health.nsw.gov.au/pds/ActivePDSDocuments/PD2012_054.pdf

It’s a 20 page report, called: Bed Numbers Data Collection. It tells you what constitutes a hospital bed. How the report was compiled. Everything. Except how many hospital beds there are in NSW!

Which brings me back to our “Patient Care Board.” In all my too numerous trips to hospital, in the last few years. I have never seen one write on. Let’s do some maths. A figure plucked from the air, let's put a price of $5 each and one-third of the beds for NSW. That is $100,000. Then we need to mount each one. $100,000 + for something that has never been written on.

This is what I love about bureaucracy, why did someone not ask the nurses why they didn’t write on the whiteboard that already existed?

In the meantime we cannot get competent surgeons. Hospitals cleaned or maintained.