The Gold Coast University hospital has become the first public health service in Australia to outsource patient care to a hotel. Administrators say it has helped ease pressure on busy emergency departments but the ama has described it as a short-term fix which exposes the underlying funding problems faced by the public health system.
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00:00Glen Britton never imagined he'd end up as a public patient in a four-star hotel.
00:07Alright, I'm just going to pop this on your arm.
00:10The 73-year-old was admitted to the Gold Coast University Hospital for a bad liver in March
00:16before being transferred to a lower-intensity care bed at SeaWorld Resort.
00:21My body's producing fluid and I need the care and if worse comes to worse,
00:27they'll have to drain it out again.
00:29The service and its patients have since been relocated to a 27-bed ward
00:34at another hotel in Southport where doctors and nurses care for them around the clock.
00:39Here is better. For the one measure, it's not noisy.
00:44The initiative, which is the first of its kind in Australia,
00:48was introduced last year to help free up hospital beds.
00:51We do a thorough assessment of the patients prior to coming
00:54to make sure they're appropriate and not too unwell
00:57and then we organise the discharge from here after they've been into the service.
01:02Gold Coast Health says more than 800 public patients have used the hotel-based hospital service
01:08as administrators grapple with a shortage of beds and a booming population.
01:13Doctors say the arrangement is a short-term solution to a problem
01:17that's plagued the healthcare system for years.
01:20This is a sign for our state and federal governments to ensure that our hospital system
01:24is adequately funded and at the same time we need to have an adequately funded primary care sector
01:29such as general practice to keep people well and out of hospital.
01:33In the meantime, the healthcare provider says it's exploring options to expand the service.