Content area
Full Text
A district hospital unit is about to experience a temporary closure, but critics suspect it is a more serious blow for health care. ANNA PATTY reports
LET'S get one thing straight here -- Sydney's Rachel Forster Hospital has not, will not, nor will it ever close.
Never mind that it no longer has inpatients or specialist doctors and that it no longer does any orthopaedic or breast cancer surgery. You can still go there today as an outpatient for community care.
Ask any health department bureaucrat and they'll tell you, Rachel Forster Hospital in Redfern is still wide open -- alive and well -- just at another location, having been transferred to its sister complex at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Camperdown.
Despite strong denials from the Liberal Government at the time that it would ever close, the doors to Kiama Hospital were slammed shut in 1992.
During his days as a consultant, previous director-general of health Mick Reid had recommended the closure.
Loud community protest followed and the Government gave endless assurances about the hospital's future.
But, behind the scenes, the Illawarra Area Health Service was quietly making plans for the facility's closure.
The hospital was eventually reopened by the Labor Government in 1998 as another community health service.
Just as many people refuse to utter the taboo "C" word in reference to cancer, health policy makers will never use the word "closure" when it comes to smaller hospitals, regardless of which party is in government, because to do so is political suicide, especially in the lead-up...