The head of the Mount Gambier hospital has moved to allay community concerns over access to private facilities and palliative care at the facility following the closure of the city’s private hospital.

Limestone Coast Local Health Network board chairman Grant King said the public hospital had taken over the private facility following its closure last month.

“Mount Gambier Private Hospital was a private hospital, but it was co-located with the public hospital and over the years it drew a lot of support from the public system,” he said.

“Nurses were employed by the public system and worked in the private ward, the cost sharing around nursing staff, facilities, goods and services were based on a normal model where private enterprise buys goods and services and pays for them.

“Along the 20 years the public system did provide a lot of subsidisation of that service for the good of the community.”

Mr King said, in terms of governance, the private hospital was governed by a separate board who in the main were all volunteers.

“There were operational and governance challenges .. to the point the private board over the last 3-4 years in particular became aware of concerns that it could not be profitable all the time,” he said.

“It reached a point where they saw best to go into voluntary administration … we in the hospital needed to think about how best we could preserve that space and continue to get maximum use for that space for our community.

“We put in place a transition plan, which the administration of the hospital are working to in terms of transitioning the private back into the public with a very strong emphasis on retaining private services for privately insured patients.

“It would seem to be now a private ward in the public hospital, without oversimplifying.

“We will continue to make sure that people who want to come into our hospital can access private care.

“As a private patient it is pretty much the same as it was.”

Mr King said it was important to retain private services for the community for a number of reasons.

“In the transition plan that is being played out, there is a very strong focus on making sure we can continue to provide private services in our hospital system,” he said.

“My understanding is the private area is quite busy still and I am confident it will continue to be a quite busy space.

“We will use that space to the best advantage for the healthcare needs of our community, it will form part of our overall service planning processes.

“It’s an opportunity for us to integrate those … 20 beds into the system.

“It gives the system not necessarily greater capacity because those beds were pretty much fully utilised … to use those beds in the whole framework of the health service.

“The transition plan will continue to identity whether there needs to be any change around that use.

“To many people that might observe the service from the outside it will appear as though nothing has changed.”

Mr King said there was “certainly a lot of discussion around palliative care from some quarters” of the community.

“Palliative care has always been available at the Mount Gambier hospital,” he said.

“There are services provided both in the public ward in the medical ward and there always have been palliative care patients within the private ward.

“That will continue. There is no need for people to be alarmed that there will be no palliative care services within the hospital.

“Palliative care services will continue as they were.

“The board in particular understands the importance of providing private services in our system.”