According to Herald-Sun special investigator Sue Dunlevy, nearly 80 private hospitals across Australia have closed during the last five years, and the private hospital sector lost a combined $611 million in 2023-24.
Two-thirds of elective surgery is undertaken in private hospitals, and the growing exodus from the sector is putting further pressure on public hospitals’ waiting lists; some 82,000 people have been waiting more than a year for surgery in a public hospital.
Meanwhile, a shortage of operating theatre staff has prompted many private hospitals to cease offering unprofitable surgical procedures, putting even more strain on the public hospital system.
The report found that from 2018 to 2023, total private admissions have grown at a compound rate of less than 1%.
Australian Medical Association (AMA) Victorian president Dr Roderick McRae warned in 2021 that hospital funding and resourcing had failed to keep pace with population growth, leaving the system badly exposed.
“We’ve seen the population [growth] in Melbourne double in the last 10 to 12 years and the bed numbers and hospital services just haven’t kept up”, he said.
Since then, we have seen one million net overseas migrants land in Australia in only two calendar years without hospital investment to match.
Here is a genuine question for policymakers: the 2023 Intergenerational Report projects that Australia’s population will grow by another 13.5 million people (50%) in only 39 years, equivalent to adding a combined Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to the current population of 27 million:
How will Australia provide enough hospitals (let alone homes, schools, roads, trains, etc) to accommodate this population deluge?
We didn’t build enough hospital capacity to accommodate the 8.3 million increase in Australia’s population so far this century.
What makes anybody believe that our policymakers will do a better job going forward?
