The NSW Nurses and Midwives Association (NSWNMA) has welcomed NSW Labor reaching an in-principle agreement for the Northern Beaches Hospital (NBH) to become public.
It follows the financial collapse of the hospital’s private owners, Healthscope, in May.
NSWNMA general secretary Shaye Candish said on October 21 that health minister Ryan Park’s announcement “will help allay fears” about jobs and entitlements.
“It has been an extremely unsettling and stressful time for staff working at NBH,” she said. The union has been told that “no nurse and midwife at NBH will lose their job and leave entitlements will be transferred when the hospital transitions to the public system”.
Candish said the union had strongly opposed and fought against the Mike Baird Coalition’s decision, a decade ago, to make NBH a public-private partnership (PPP). “We warned the previous government this would be detrimental to the community … and feared this model of healthcare would fail the Northern Beaches community, and now that’s been realised.
“NSWNMA members at NBH have been raising staffing and safety concerns for years,” Candish said, adding that they never gave up the fight to have the hospital brought back into public hands.
Candish said the union is looking forward to the hospital now implementing nurse-to-patient ratios to “provide safer workplaces and quality care”.
Park announced on October 21 that Labor was spending $190 million to buy back the NBH and integrate it into the public system. He said the deal with and its receiver was complex and included that all 494 beds would return to public ownership; NSW Health would employ all existing clinical workers and staff entitlements would be transferred to the NSW health department.
While some clinicians want some private services to continue, he said the in-principle deal to buy the entire operation was a starting point.
Labor passed “Joe’s Law” in March, which bans PPPs in hospitals running emergency, surgical and inpatient services. It came about after the September 2024 death of two-year-old Joe Massa, who collapsed and died after he and his parents waited three hours in the NBH emergency department.
Western Sydney nursing lecturer and Socialist Alliance member Paula Sanchez told 鶹ý she hopes this will be the “last disastrous experiment” and that there should not need to be a law against selling off public hospitals and other public health facilities — it should be a given.
“The tragic lesson is that privatisation means putting private profits above community needs, and as we have been made painfully aware, in public health settings this results in deaths.”
Sanchez said NSW Labor should be doing more to strengthen the public health system, including mandating nurse-to-patient ratios “as other states do”.