Tuesday, 21 March 2023

Alfred hospital

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (17:22): (119) My adjournment matter this evening is for the attention of the Minister for Health, and it is in regard to the condition of the Alfred hospital. People in this chamber know that I have been asking the government for years to provide proper funding to the Alfred hospital.

David Davis: It’s deteriorating.

Georgie CROZIER: It is deteriorating, and it is in a terrible state in some parts, Mr Davis, and I will come to that point in a minute.

David Davis: There are rats.

Georgie CROZIER: Well, there were mice in the theatre. When I went through, finally, the Alfred last year after the government allowed me to go and visit it, I was taken into the theatres, and I was told by a surgeon that they had seen mice in the theatre areas. I worked in those theatres some decades ago, and they have not changed at all. They need upgrading. You have got leaks in various parts of the hospital and mice running around in theatres. It is completely unacceptable.

I want to also bring the house’s attention to some of the comments around the state of the Alfred by Professor Mark Fitzgerald, who is the director of trauma services there, who described the work at Alfred’s trauma centre with emergency and trauma patients like ‘waves’ on a beach, ‘they never stop’. The intensive care unit deputy director Andrew Udy said demand had been steadily increasing for years and they had been running ‘essentially at or near capacity for quite a period of time’. Professor Fitzgerald has previously declared that conditions at the hospital are hopeless, and he made an urgent call for the state government to reveal their plan for one of Australia’s oldest and busiest hospitals – yet it is all falling on deaf ears. There is no money that is needed to the extent that the Alfred needs it. When you have got eminent healthcare professionals like Mark Fitzgerald and Andrew Udy, who are working in these very busy areas of intensive care and the trauma unit, you have got to take notice, yet the Andrews government has failed to do that.

It has been noted that Professor Fitzgerald said that the hospital was in dire need of investment and staff needed to know if it was going to be upgraded or closed. In a 2018 review he described the Alfred’s operating theatres as prehistoric. It is just ridiculous that in 2023 we are still talking about this, given the work that they have done and what they have done over the past few years with COVID. I have been through that intensive care unit and the trauma centre, and they do extraordinary work. The action I seek is for the government to prioritise the Alfred in this year’s budget and provide the planning and the funding to upgrade this vital hospital, not only for thousands of Victorian patients but also for many, many Australian patients.