Politics is a matter of perception.
When a crisis arises, a shrewd politician often apologizes, orders an “urgent” internal review, and forms a committee to draw up guidelines to ensure the situation never happens again.
Disaster averted.
That was the case this week as details emerged of a young woman’s treatment at Ipswich Hospital in Brisbane’s west after a miscarriage at 12 weeks pregnant.
New Queensland Health Minister Shannon Fentiman, not even a month into the job, had to face allegations the woman was forced to sit in a hospital waiting room wrapped in sheets and sitting in her own blood.
The woman reportedly claimed she sat in the emergency room for hours with a biohazard bag containing the contents of her miscarriage and that hospital staff used her phone’s flashlight partner to examine her cervix before discharge.
Faced with the case this week, Ms Fentiman described the woman’s treatment as “absolutely heartbreaking” and “not good enough”. A hard feeling to argue with.
He ordered Queensland Health to work “as a matter of urgency” with frontline staff to develop best practice guidelines and models of care for women experiencing miscarriage.
But her department already has detailed pregnancy loss guidelines, published in October last year, which will not be revised again until 2027.
It can be accessed by a simple Google search – all 38 pages.
Shannon Fentiman took over as health minister last month. ()
Asked to comment on the discrepancy, Queensland Health chief executive Shaun Drummond said: “We have clinical guidelines for procedures and interventions for patients who have a clinical outcome that causes significant psychological distress.
“We have not developed a comprehensive statewide model for compassionate and trauma-informed care or integrated them into our clinical guidelines.
“However, we will now develop these models of care to ensure integration into our clinical guidelines and then implement their implementation in practice.”
This comes from a department under significant pressure after years of dealing with a deadly pandemic; an ongoing maternity crisis for years in the regions; worsening of the ambulance ramp; severe labor shortage; and expectations are already overwhelming demand for public mental health services, which will soar further amid cost-of-living pressures.
For the uninformed, it would be fair enough to assume from Mr Drummond’s statement that the pregnancy loss guidelines did not take into account the trauma associated with having a miscarriage, a tragedy that one in four pregnant women will experience .
But detailed sections of the 38-page document are devoted to “psychological support” and “psychological morbidity” associated with early pregnancy loss.
In other words, the work that Mrs. Fentiman has assigned to her department is already done.
It is the same department tasked by former health minister Yvette D’Ath with developing a centralized reporting process that would allow health workers to raise quality and safety concerns if they do not feel heard by their individual hospital management.
This was in September last year following the Mackay Base Hospital maternity review. More than eight months later, that work continues.
This system might have protected at least some Mackay women from harm if midwives felt safe to report serious concerns about maternity care to the local public hospital.
Instead, they went to patient advocate Beryl Crosby more than 600km away in Bundaberg to make their complaints, which she then had to agitate for an investigation.
As Queensland Health staff scramble to review and rewrite existing miscarriage guidelines in the wake of a highly publicized case this week, other issues – potentially affecting the care of thousands – continue to plague the health system public of the state.
In the run-up to next year’s state election, the new minister will likely need to focus on the bigger issues affecting public health, rather than isolated cases that perhaps should have been dealt with at a management level individual hospital
