Battle Undies
Comments
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See, several of you have great ideas for your own projects--things that interest any of us personally tend to lead to investigation of options and recognition of gaps in service. I think you should consider what you might be able to do either collectively or as individuals
I'm resolutely sticking to my guns and asking awkward questions about how a hospital that services over 40,000 people has:
- No dedicated lymphedema service
- No arrangements to cover the absence of the only community physio --who quadruples as a pediatric, post surgical, chronic disease and cancer rehab physio--while she is on long service leave for a couple of months.
The physio is a personal friend of mine, she tells me that she could easily fill another two days a week with lymphedema patients that she either has to turn away or spend inadequate time with.
Timing can be everything with an advocacy campaign, there is irrefutable evidence that funding for this service is inadequate. Everyone will blame everyone else for that shortfall.
You can bet that the CEO's PA would be replaced under similar circumstances because they would have budgeted for it. All community physio appointments have been suspended. Urgent cases will be referred to private practitioners through the post acute funding stream. No one seems to be able to explain that to me in terms a lay person can understand. Revise that, no-one knows much about that process because it rarely happens. Not good enough. At all.
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Ok I misunderstood
In my view if you are honing in one facility (Hospital) you probably need to start with their budget to see what their allocation of staff specialists are for your area of interest.
A submission to the Board to spark the interest in a service that is under resourced.
Good luck with it
The subject matter sounds like a subject for a thesis1 -
Maybe - we have 2 metro Encore facilities here both in public hospitals- one north , one south - with hydrotherapy pools at quieter times when perhaps under-utilised.
Given we nearly had only one as private hydrotherapy pool access cost was prohibitive for the Y I think the public hospital pools must have been at a lower rate.
Is a Victorian issue really -just was curious about hydrotherapy pools in Victorian regional public hospitals. The NSW Encore program is extensive including in the regions.0 -
Hi, @iserbrown, the lymphoedema site you found is the Australasian Lymphology Association website, the peak body, in Australia, regarding lymphoedema. The area that wevcan see has consumer information, including a find a practitioner link, and general lymphoedema information. The health professionals information is behind a membership "wall". There is actually quite a lot of good information avalable online. The larger problem is access to services. Very few places have good public, funded services for lymphoedema, and even where they do it is a constant battle to maintain funding for the service. Lymphoedema doesn't have a medicare benifits scheme item number, which can make obtaining public funding for a service very challenging.
The ALA is currently trying to advocate and raise awareness around this issue1
