Latest news with #Healthscope
News.com.au
13 hours ago
- Health
- News.com.au
NSW government seeking power to terminate Northern Beaches Hospital contract
The NSW government will have power to terminate the operating contract of the embattled Northern Beaches Hospital as if a default had occurred under proposed legislative amendments, following the tragic deaths of two children. Two-year-old Joe Massa and newborn Harper Atkinson both died at the Sydney hospital in unrelated incidents since September, leading the government to ban any future public-private partnerships (PPPs) for acute care hospitals. The state government will next week introduce amendments to a bill by Wakehurst MP Michael Regan, which would allow the government, if required, to terminate the contract of operator Healthscope as if a default had occurred. It comes after receivers were appointed to Healthscope's parent entities – which the NSW government considers a default – with the bill giving Health Minister Ryan Park power to issue a termination notice if an agreement is not reached. Treasurer Daniel Moohkey would also be empowered to ensure that compensation negotiations occur in a 'reasonable time frame' and that an independent person would be appointed to determine compensation if an agreement is not reached. Mr Moohkey said the decision was not taken lightly. 'We are now in a position where the Liberal's privatisation mess means Healthscope's receivers are negotiating the future of the Northern Beaches Hospital,' he said. 'While an agreed exit from this failed PPP contract remains my preference – I must ensure the government has the right to step in and protect the Northern Beaches community from this dragging on.' Mr Park said the state government had 'made it clear from the very beginning that we don't support this sort of arrangement. 'This is a complex contract but the community deserves certainty. 'The other mob may have created this mess, but we are going to be the ones to clean it up.' Healthscope is the country's second-largest hospital operator, with a network of 37 hospitals across Australia. Thousands of staff and patients were left in limbo last month after Canada-based Brookfield Asset Management offered to hand control of the company to lenders. Despite an $100m funding lifeline by Commonwealth Bank and Westpac last month amid the search for a new owner, Healthscope's future remains in doubt. Earlier that month, Wakehurst MP Michael Regan introduced a private members bill to ensure no compensation would be payable on behalf of the state if the contract for the Northern Beaches Hospital was voluntarily terminated. With trilateral talks ongoing between Healthscope, its receivers, and the Northern Beaches Hospital Taskforce, the state government remained hopeful of a productive outcome, but reserved the right to commit to a voluntary termination. At the time of the receivership, Healthscope CEO Tino La Spina said the hospital network would 'continue to operate as normal' and that the appointment of receivers 'ensures a stable path to a sale, with no impacts on any hospitals, staff or patients' 'There is no interruption to the outstanding care we provide,' she said. 'The receivers and management share the same goal of maintaining our market leading standards of patient care and protecting the business, the hospitals and our amazing people.'
The Guardian
14 hours ago
- Business
- The Guardian
News live: NSW to make legal move on privatised hospital; Israel boasts ‘close collaboration' with Australia
Update: Date: 2025-06-19T20:27:55.000Z Title: NSW government moves to end partnership deal over Northern Beaches hospital Content: The Minns Labor government is arming itself with new powers to terminate the public-private partnership (PPP) with bankrupt Northern Beaches hospital operator Healthscope in the event that it cannot reach an agreement. The government announced today it would introduce amendments to a private member's bill brought forward by the member for Wakehurst, Michael Regan, next week so it could – if required – terminate the Northern Beaches PPP contract. This follows the appointment of receivers to the parent entities of Healthscope, which the NSW government considers a default under the contract. Healthscope has argued that the termination would be ' voluntary' and would attract compensation as set out on the contract. The government said this would run to hundreds of millions of dollars. 'This is not a decision we take lightly,' the NSW treasurer, Daniel Mookhey, said. But we are now in a position where the Liberals' privatisation mess means Healthscope's receivers are negotiating the future of the Northern Beaches hospital. While an agreed exit from this failed PPP contract remains my preference, I must ensure the government has the right to step in and protect the Northern Beaches community from this dragging on. Update: Date: 2025-06-19T20:27:02.000Z Title: Welcome Content: Good morning and welcome to our live news blog. I'm Martin Farrer with the top overnight stories and then Nick Visser will be in the hot seat. Israel's deputy foreign minister told the ABC's 7.30 last night that her country had 'a very close collaboration' with Australian security agencies. However, when pressed on the question she did not elaborate on whether that included sharing intelligence about Iran's nuclear program. More coming up. The Minns Labor government is arming itself with new powers to terminate the public-private partnership (PPP) with bankrupt Northern Beaches hospital operator Healthscope in the event that it cannot reach an agreement. More coming up on that too.
Perth Now
15 hours ago
- Health
- Perth Now
Bold plan for crisis-ridden hospital
The NSW government will have power to terminate the operating contract of the embattled Northern Beaches Hospital as if a default had occurred under proposed legislative amendments, following the tragic deaths of two children. Two-year-old Joe Massa and newborn Harper Atkinson both died at the Sydney hospital in unrelated incidents since September, leading the government to ban any future public-private partnerships (PPPs) for acute care hospitals. The state government will next week introduce amendments to a bill by Wakehurst MP Michael Regan, which would allow the government, if required, to terminate the contract of operator Healthscope as if a default had occurred. It comes after receivers were appointed to Healthscope's parent entities – which the NSW government considers a default – with the bill giving Health Minister Ryan Park power to issue a termination notice if an agreement is not reached. Receivers were appointed to Northern Beaches Hospital operator Healthscope's parent entities in May. NewsWire / Max Mason-Hubers Credit: News Corp Australia Treasurer Daniel Moohkey would also be empowered to ensure that compensation negotiations occur in a 'reasonable time frame' and that an independent person would be appointed to determine compensation if an agreement is not reached. Mr Moohkey said the decision was not taken lightly. 'We are now in a position where the Liberal's privatisation mess means Healthscope's receivers are negotiating the future of the Northern Beaches Hospital,' he said. 'While an agreed exit from this failed PPP contract remains my preference – I must ensure the government has the right to step in and protect the Northern Beaches community from this dragging on.' Mr Park said the state government had 'made it clear from the very beginning that we don't support this sort of arrangement. NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey said the decision was not taken lightly. NewsWire / Nikki Short Credit: News Corp Australia 'This is a complex contract but the community deserves certainty. 'The other mob may have created this mess, but we are going to be the ones to clean it up.' Healthscope is the country's second-largest hospital operator, with a network of 37 hospitals across Australia. Thousands of staff and patients were left in limbo last month after Canada-based Brookfield Asset Management offered to hand control of the company to lenders. Despite an $100m funding lifeline by Commonwealth Bank and Westpac last month amid the search for a new owner, Healthscope's future remains in doubt. Earlier that month, Wakehurst MP Michael Regan introduced a private members bill to ensure no compensation would be payable on behalf of the state if the contract for the Northern Beaches Hospital was voluntarily terminated. Health Minister Ryan Park would have power to issue a termination notice if an agreement is not reached. NewsWire / Nikki Short Credit: News Corp Australia With trilateral talks ongoing between Healthscope, its receivers, and the Northern Beaches Hospital Taskforce, the state government remained hopeful of a productive outcome, but reserved the right to commit to a voluntary termination. At the time of the receivership, Healthscope CEO Tino La Spina said the hospital network would 'continue to operate as normal' and that the appointment of receivers 'ensures a stable path to a sale, with no impacts on any hospitals, staff or patients' 'There is no interruption to the outstanding care we provide,' she said. 'The receivers and management share the same goal of maintaining our market leading standards of patient care and protecting the business, the hospitals and our amazing people.' McGrathNicol Restructuring had been appointed to work with Healthscope management to complete the sale.
ABC News
08-06-2025
- Health
- ABC News
Whistleblowers say warnings about patient safety at Northern Beaches Hospital were ignored
Whistleblowers from Sydney's Northern Beaches Hospital say repeated warnings about unsafe conditions have been ignored for years, as internal documents reveal a system in crisis. Senior doctors have raised alarms about dangerously low levels of junior medical doctors, inadequate equipment, and failing technology since 2018. They say many of those warnings were ignored, with internal documents revealing direct harm to patients. A senior anaesthetist wrote that after hours there was no capacity within their team to deal with a third patient, whether that be an emergency caesarean or epidural, and that essential equipment was often left broken, with staff told to "steal one from another theatre". In late 2023, 18 emergency department specialists formally warned Healthscope management that patient safety and staff wellbeing was at risk due to dangerously low night staffing, and severe access block with very sick patients being left in the waiting room and other unmonitored environments due to a lack of beds. "We have all seen direct harm to patients from these occurrences and will expect further major harm if these issues are not resolved promptly," the group wrote. Dr Patrick Coleman, a nephrologist who has worked at the hospital since its opening, said the crisis was predictable. "It was never going to work. "We were ignored. But that's exactly what happened." Northern Beaches Hospital is run by private operator Healthscope, which collapsed into receivership last month. The 37 hospitals they run across Australia are now for sale. Northern Beaches Hospital delivers public hospital services under a controversial public-private partnership. NSW Health Minister Ryan Park told 7.30 the government was negotiating to bring the hospital into public hands, but warned it would not be cheap. "There will be significant costs, without a doubt. We'll probably have to change the way in which it's staffed, there's likely to be issues with their IT system that we have to address – those two things alone are likely to be significant, we understand that," Mr Park said. Healthscope CEO Tino La Spina welcomed the NSW government's plan to take over the hospital but warned the hospital system across Australia was in trouble, saying there was a "chronic underfunding of the private hospital sector by the private health insurers". He says he is proud of Northern Beaches Hospital's overall performance record. "We continue to operate a safe hospital there," he said. "All of the key performance measures suggest that we are a safe hospital and safer than others in New South Wales." Sydney's Northern Beaches were once served by two smaller public hospitals at Manly and Mona Vale. But as the region's population grew, frontline staff said they were running on fumes. "Manly and Mona Vale were getting death by 1,000 cuts," respiratory physician Keith Burgess said. In 2014 the NSW Liberal government announced the two hospitals would be shut and replaced with a single, more modern facility, delivered through a public-private partnership (PPP). It was a model with a troubled past. Previous PPP hospitals nationally had failed, including in Mildura, Victoria and Port Macquarie in New South Wales. But Professor Burgess said he was willing to give it a go. His colleague Dr Coleman was optimistic at first. "I thought, 'Hallelujah, finally we're going to have a new hospital,'" Dr Coleman said. He joined the new hospital's medical advisory committee, eager to help shape the way the hospital would run. But in the months leading up to the hospital opening, Dr Coleman raised urgent concerns. He warned management their plan to hire too few junior doctors was dangerous for a facility expected to treat large numbers of older, more complex patients. "It was patently obvious that the model that was proposed was utterly absurd," he told 7.30. But he says his warnings were dismissed. "I wasn't getting a response. I felt that I was wasting my time," he said. Frustrated, he resigned from the medical advisory committee but kept raising the alarm. "I said it verbally. I said it at meetings and I said it in writing. It didn't make any difference." The hospital finally opened on October 30, 2018. The early days were rocky. Within 48 hours the CEO quit. The anaesthetics department threatened a walkout and, according to Professor Burgess, conditions on the wards were chaotic. "The Healthscope team hadn't stocked the shelves and a whole lot of the basic equipment was not available in the wards," he said. Within eight months a parliamentary inquiry was launched into the hospital's operations and management. Healthscope apologised and promised improvements. In the years since, the Northern Beaches Hospital has been repeatedly engulfed in crises. In February the family of two-year-old Joe Massa went public after his tragic death following critical delays in care at this hospital. The backlash was swift. The NSW government proposed a ban on any future public-private hospital partnerships. And in April the family of deceased toddler Harper Atkinson told 7.30 their story. Emergency doctor Cliff Reid says his colleagues in the emergency department are bearing the brunt of public fury. "Our team has been called 'baby killers'. A junior doctor has had a threat of her tyres being slashed as she was walking into the department," Dr Reid said. "Nurses have been spat on … all following recent negative publicity in the media about the hospital." He said the community should trust the care they receive at the hospital. Despite the concerns he has continued to raise Dr Coleman says patients receive an excellent level of care at the hospital, considering the low numbers of staff, when compared to other hospitals in the area. However, he says it comes at a cost with staff stretched to breaking point. 7.30 has obtained internal hospital records and written staff testimonies that reveal the extent of the crisis. In October 2024, a senior emergency physician warned the ED was fully staffed with junior doctors only 9 per cent of the time, which is just over 15 hours a week, and that the situation was expected to worsen this year. Dr Reid has defended the hospital's executive, saying some of these concerns have been addressed. "From a clinical service delivery point of view our emergency department is very highly performing, has amazing staff, an incredible high culture, a dedicated team that saves lives every day," he said. Mr La Spina denied the hospital's problems were due to cost cutting. "We will never, and I repeat never, put profits ahead of patient care, ever," he told 7.30. "It's what we're all about here and we've got amazing clinicians that come to work every single day to give their best." A second parliamentary inquiry into Northern Beaches Hospital is now underway. And while submissions are confidential, 7.30 has obtained more distressing staff testimonies. One anaesthetist wrote that staffing levels in their department were very unsafe and that on one occasion "we had absolutely zero capacity to deal with any emergency at all during a normal weekday". He warned that after hours "there is no capacity for a third patient, whether it be for an emergency caesarean or an epidural for a woman in labour". Trainee supervision is also falling far below national standards, according to the submission. He wrote that anaesthetist trainees were supervised only 4 per cent of the time instead of the ANZCA (Australia New Zealand College of Anaesthetists) recommended 80 per cent, or a bare minimum of 50 per cent supervision. The department's equipment was also highlighted, with the anaesthetist documenting that the hospital was failing to replace broken or missing essential equipment. "We were told if we don't have one to just try and steal one from another theatre," he wrote. Ultrasound access for their department was documented as dangerously inadequate, as the unit had only two for 16 theatres, instead of the usual one per operating theatre. "The cardiac anaesthetists have taken to stealing and deliberately hiding the ultrasound machines 'in case' they need it," he said. The only other ultrasound technology available to their department is critically outdated. The anaesthetist wrote that a sales representative once confessed to him that Northern Beaches Hospital bought the cheapest model and that "it is the only hospital in the world to buy this model". Staff have raised concerns about inadequate technology since before the hospital opened its doors in October 2018. However 7.30 can reveal that many of those issues persist, even seven years on. In the medical staff council's submission to the auditor-general inquiry, it said that Riskman — the technology used to monitor adverse events — is grossly underused due to being excessively time-consuming and that the data obtained and used by Healthscope to reflect safety records may not be accurate. Keith Burgess, president of the medical staff council, told 7.30 he had never used Riskman. "Certainly I can't think of any senior doctor who has acknowledged that they've used it," he said. Following the death of Joe Massa, the an independent review recommended critical changes were needed for the hospital's electronic medical records (EMR) system. Dr Coleman says the EMR has had some improvements but it continues to be problematic to this day. "The EMR system was constantly crashing. There were times when the EMR system was crashed for hours at a time," he said. "Nobody can access the patient's medications. They can't alter the medications, they can't prescribe medications, they can't look at the patient's observations." He says NSW Health and the local health district absolved itself of responsibility of the operation of the hospital and it should now be held accountable. Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7:30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV Do you know more about this story? Get in touch with 7.30 here.
The Age
06-06-2025
- Business
- The Age
‘Over my dead body': Fight to keep Healthscope's hospitals alive just getting started
Canadian investment firm Brookfield is a global financial giant with a trillion dollars under management, yet it could not save Healthscope and decided to walk away with a $2 billion loss. In simple terms, it paid too much using too much debt, and sold off the land for many of these hospitals to landlords under deals that allowed them to charge too much for rent. As an interesting contrast, unlike Healthscope, Ramsay owns most of its hospitals and the land they sit on. It means Healthscope lenders who are owed $1.6 billion, including Australia's Big Four banks, will also wear massive losses once the proceeds of the sale are divvied up between them. The good news is that this will ensure the business is transferred with zero debt in any sale. Landlords will also be wearing a lot of the pain to help many of these hospitals become financially viable for a new private owner. The alternative is closure if state governments don't step into the breach. Healthscope's hospitals would be empty if doctors lost faith and moved their elective surgeries to private hospitals nearby. This explains why Healthscope reached its own abyss well ahead of its rivals, and faces a much larger challenge just to get back to the abysmal state the sector as a whole faces. Separate to this is the immediate challenge that La Spina faces in running the day-to-day operations at the hospitals, and it explains why his fireside chat came with so much heat: Healthscope desperately needs to keep faith with the many specialist doctors and surgeons who actually generate its revenue. Around 70 per cent of elective surgeries in Australia take place in a private hospital. La Spina knows that the last thing they want is Healthscope in the hands of a private health insurer, who could dictate how much a hip replacement should cost. Loading Healthscope's hospitals would be empty if these doctors lost faith and moved their elective surgeries to other private hospitals. If this business flows out the door, it doesn't matter what happens to its rent bill and debt levels. La Spina may not like it, but the truth is BUPA is almost certainly among the parties interested in buying either all of Healthscope's operations or parts thereof, and there is nothing he can do about it. His immediate priority is to keep the day-to-day business running while the lender-appointed receivers from McGrathNicol kick off the sales process next month, with as many as 30 parties interested in Healthscope as of this week. The receivers have one job, maximise the sale price and return as much money as possible to the lenders. Loading To this end, they are expected to focus on a single transaction involving all of Healthscope's assets - if possible. The price will be determined by the receiver's delicate dance with landlords over how much financial pain they are willing to endure to give potential suitors confidence they are buying a viable business. If the rent concessions are too low, the hospitals won't find a buyer and their staff could be out of a job. The success of any sale is also heavily dependent on whether all potential white knights are allowed to come to Healthscope's rescue.
