An article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald is really frightening – it tells of a boy in England who died of meningitis. His father is quoted as saying, “He felt ill at 6.30 am and by midnight he was brain dead.” Luckily when he was eventually taken to a doctor, the doctor diagnosed the boy’s illness as meningitis straight away – but he still couldn’t save him.
We wouldn’t like to be betting that in NSW this would happen – that if a child was taken to a government hospital with meningitis that he or she would be correctly diagnosed. Proper diagnosis would seem to require some pretty specialised knowledge.
Some months ago there was a SMH article in which it was claimed that a women’s life could have been saved if the frontline ambulance people had know which hospital it was best to take her to. We wrote to the completely useless and hopeless Jillian Skinner suggesting that perhaps the frontline ambulance people needed guidance from some people who specialised in knowing which hospital was best for what, which we would have thought would be fairly easy to set up – and, of course, got nowhere.
We believe that if ever a child with meningitis or anything else for that matter died because they’d been taken to the wrong hospital, Ms Skinner should be sent to gaol for a very long time, perhaps even more so, the people responsible for the NSW people having this silly old women as our Minister for Health.
We’ve been writing to Ms Skinner for a very long time now, and while she was in the opposition she used to bemoan the fact that she didn’t have access to the “benefits of office” to do her job. Since she’s had the benefits of office, which has been for nearly 5 years now, things have been getting worse and worse and worse and worse. Any emails you get from her these days are unintelligible. We suspect she doesn’t even come to work.