Keen to see and understand the story for ourselves,photographer Janie Barrett and I drove eight hours to Wells’ home town of Cobar in the state’s dusty inland centre.
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Doing laps of the town’s main street,it didn’t take long to stumble across a group of knockabout blokes who jokingly referred to themselves as “the coffee club”,sunning themselves in their usual location outside Subway.
Their banter was playful butthe stories they and other locals shared about the state of local hospitals were disturbing. After I published my first series of articles which focused on the western NSW towns of Cobar and Dubbo,the floodgates opened. I realised Allan Wells’ death was at the crest of a very large iceberg.
I began pursuing tales of appalling dysfunction from all over NSW:a woman had bled to death in an emergency department with no doctors on site;doctors alleging the systemic cover-up of preventable deaths;and the death of a baby whose test results were among thousands that went unchecked.
Channel Nine journalist Liz Hayes drove further momentum as she courageously stepped forwardto reveal her own father’s preventable death in a hospital on the Mid North Coast.
A parliamentary inquiry was launched and captured the true extent of the crisis as it travelled around the state for 12 months,holding 15 public hearings and taking more than 700 submissions. I made it my mission to read every single one.
Bill Howlett,Chris Boucher,and Pete Rogers on Cobar’s main street. They spoke out about the local hospital despite concerns about ruffling feathers in the tight-knit community.Credit:Janie Barrett
The stories that emerged were akin to something you might see in a developing nation:cooks,cleaners and gardeners stepping in to fill the void as the numbers of doctors and nurses dwindled to critical levels.
The inquiry’s damning final report,handed down last month,comprehensively lays out the dysfunction in the system and offers a range of solutions,although it remains to be seen whether they will be implemented and with what success.
The next leg of my work will aim to hold our parliamentarians to account as they embark on that process.
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I will also be probing unanswered questions about the report’s claims that the NSW Health bureaucracy has bred a toxic “culture of fear” in which patients,nurses and doctors feel afraid to speak out about problems in the system.
In retrospect,it doesn’t surprise me that it took journalists from Sydney to expose the crisis in bush care.
Deeply ingrained country stoicism and a fear of creating bad blood in close-knit communities has seen many patients afraid to rock the boat by speaking up. Sadly,several have faced retribution for their involvement in theHerald’sstories.
For city patients,the hospital’s general manager is a faceless bureaucrat;in the country,it can be your neighbour or your cousin. For city patients who have a traumatic experience,an alternative emergency department can be a few suburbs away;in the country,it’s often hundreds of kilometres.
How does one elderly man’s death affect an overhaul of the largest health system in Australia,a behemoth with an inertia to change and annual expenditure in excess of $57 billion?
It was a daughter’s love for her dad,and her refusal to let the circumstances surrounding his death go,that compelled me to act.
And it was the immense response to the stories from subscribers like you that left policymakers with no choice but to respond,dispelling notions that readers in the cities are indifferent to the plight of their cousins in the bush.
Allan Wells,the man from Cobar who cared about everyone except himself,deserved nothing less.