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St John of God states Midland position By Matthew Biddle MEDIA reports last week suggested SJGHC’s strong stance on not performing abortions or sterilisations or providing contraception at the hospital was only recently made known to the Government, but the group’s CEO, Dr Michael Stanford said that was incorrect. “We wrote to the State four years ago before we got involved with the bid and we said we can’t do these things, we’re not allowed to do them and we don’t wish to do them, and if you require them to be done, we will not bid,” he said. “They wrote back to us and they said ‘We’ve thought about this and we will not be requiring any operator to do those procedures’. So we were able to progress with the bid.” Dr Stanford said that, although SJGHC has no control over whether a separate facility is built or not, it has made it clear it would not be linked to the hospital. “It certainly would be our preference that there’s no clinic, and when we talked to the department we said ‘Those services could be provided at other hospitals’,” Dr Stanford said. “There’s good health planning reasons why we don’t as well as the moral ones, but it won’t be up to us.” The Government has stated that they expect about 29,000 patient admissions to be carried out at the new hospital every year. Of these, it is estimated that 250 procedures would be services that SJGHC will not provide – abortions, sterilisations and the like. Dr Stanford said 250 patients a year would not be enough to make a separate clinic worth building. “A private operator could not sustain a business with one patient per day... it wouldn’t work,” he said. “The only way it would work is if they did a lot of other private work, but then they’d have to compete with us, and we’ve spent $70 million on building a private hospital, we’ll be running the public hospital, we’ll be sending them no work and we’ll treat them like a competitor.” If a stand-alone clinic was built, the new SJGHC hospital would not refer patients there for abortions, Dr Stanford said. “We’re very conscious of our responsibilities as a Catholic healthcare provider,” he said. “The Catholic Church has a very clear view on the sanctity and the dignity of all human life, and that human life starts at conception.
Above and below, artist’s impressions of the public hospital to be run by Catholic healthcare provider, St John of God, alongside its private hospital.
“That drives us towards the compassionate care of people that we’re pretty famous for.” After speaking to several media outlets last week, Dr Stanford said
say they don’t know what the fuss was about,” he said. “So our view is we’ve got to build our reputation as a public hospital operator – we’ve got a great reputation as a private
“The Catholic Church has a very clear view on the sanctity and the dignity of human life, and that every human life starts at conception.” it was important the public understood SJGHC had made its position clear from the outset. “The reality for us is people won’t trust us until we’ve run that hospital brilliantly for a few years, and then they’ll all
hospital operator – but we’re starting from scratch as a public operator. We’ve got to win the community’s confidence, and work closely with them and provide great care, so that’s what we plan to do.”
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1300 655 003 www.catholicinsurance.org.au 22/01/2014 9:53:12 AM