Radiologist shortage a risk: doctors’ union
Patients are being put at risk because of a shortage of radiologists at Lyell McEwen Hospital, a doctors’ union says.
InDaily understands several radiologists working at the hospital as visiting medical specialists last month refused more permanent, less flexible contracts offered by SA Health.
Radiologists from other hospitals have been tasked with reading medical images taken at the LMH – such as x-rays – while SA Health fills vacancies.
Six radiologists are currently employed at the LMH and two vacancies remain, with one radiologist due to begin next month, but SA Health declined to comment on the number of radiologists who did not renew their contracts.
According to senior LMH doctor and president of the South Australian Salaried Medical Officers’ Association David Pope, a shortage of radiologists at the hospital had been an ongoing problem that risks the health of patients.
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He said the shortage of radiology services was “causing great delays in reporting”.
“You’ve got delayed diagnosis, and any delay in diagnosis is often quite serious,” he said.
“If it turns out that someone’s got something severely going wrong (the) intervention to deal with that is also delayed, and you risk their life.”
Pope said SA Health had failed to employ enough radiologists to meet demand for “many years”.
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“It’s always been very short up there,” he said.
“For a long time (SA Health) should have recruited proper numbers of radiologists.
“They’re all under enormous pressure and stress with the workload they’ve had to deal with, and that issue (has been) ignored for too long.
“There are significant shortfalls in the number of images that they can report.
“Therefore, there is a lot of work that has to go out to other sites and other groups of radiographers.”
He said a “substantial increase in the workload” had coincided with insufficient recruitment of radiologists
“The demand is enormous and the supply is almost zero.”
However, an SA Health spokesperson told InDaily: “The Lyell McEwin Hospital provides a safe, reliable and timely imaging service to the community”.
“As a result of the hard work of our radiologists at the Lyell McEwin Hospital and support of their colleagues at other hospitals, the turnaround time for images at the LMH is in line with imaging services at our other major hospitals.”
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists declined to comment, other than to say the issue was “an internal HR matter for the hospital”.
Image: Matt Clare
