Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Deleting

I was trying to take photos on my iPhone yesterday afternoon when a warning flashed up that the memory was nearly full (no wonder with 9068 photos)!



So now I'm sitting here deleting and I came across these.

The aftermath of the false alarm.

Counting the needle holes in that photo, there was at least 14 attempts at the epidural. No wonder I had a backache for two weeks. Ouch.

Anyway.. the Ombudsman's report into last years closure of the Lung Transplant program at the Alfred was released today.

Here's today's Age Newspaper report:


The Alfred hospital in Melbourne turned away a set of lungs during a week-long closure of its lung transplant program due to a lack of funding, the ombudsman has found.

But the lungs were from a 71-year-old and would have been unlikely to be used had the program been operating due to the person's age.

Alfred Health shut its adult transplant program from September 22 to 28 in 2011.

It had been expecting $3 million in funding from the Department of Health that did not eventuate.
 
Ombudsman George Brouwer said during the closure, a set of lungs from an obese 71-year-old was rejected.

He said due to the person's age they would not have been used had the program been running, but it was lucky more organs were not rejected.

"While my investigation concluded that the closure did not appear to have had an adverse impact on patients in critical need, it was fortuitous that The Alfred only received (and rejected) one organ offer during the closure, as in previous weeks it had received up to eight offers," Mr Brouwer said in his report tabled to parliament on Wednesday.

He criticised the hospital for failing to conduct an independent costing review of its transplant program, despite promising to do so one year ago.

Lung transplants at The Alfred doubled from 2006-07 to 2010-11 as a result of the federal government's initiative to increase organ and tissue donations.

Clinical director Professor Trevor Williams said the program's staff and funding was based on the historical figure of between 40 and 45 lung transplants each year and the hospital was tracking to perform twice that in 2011-12.

AAP

2 comments:

Cat from Raspberry Rainbow said...

9068 photos, now that is crazy stuff!

So are those photos.

Jennifer Rose said...

ouch ouch ouch!!!