A senior Australian gastroenterologist has hit out at government and bureaucrats who she says are ignoring the evidence that IBD nurses mean better patient outcomes.
And she warns that many clinicians working in high end IBD care services are feeling burned out and frustrated. She says her frustration has reached such a crisis point she is considering walking away from the public health system.
Professor Jane Andrews, Chair of the Australian Inflammatory Bowel Disease Association, head of Inflammatory Bowel Disease Services at the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s Centre for Digestive Diseases, accused the government of ‘fobbing us off’ by refusing to provide funding for more IBD nurses.
“We already have plenty of evidence and data on the table that shows it works,” she said. “IBD nurses are a cost-effective way of multiplying specialist care, yet we can’t get the funding for enough of them.”
Professor Andrews said there were very few IBD nurses who were funded by hospitals, with many retained using ‘soft funding’ or other funding streams. She estimates that around 100 full time equivalent IBD nurses are needed at public hospitals to work in IBD clinics.
“We (specialists) lose money out of doing this as a group,” she told the limbic. “If we’re saying it’s a great thing and it’s against our business interests, shouldn’t that say we are not making this up?
“Specialists want an efficient health care system. People say it’s the doctors not wanting to do it (have more nurses providing specialised care), but that’s a load of rubbish most of the time. It’s about who is going to pay for it.”
Professor Andrews provided some valuable insight into her push for more IBD nurses in a supplement article published in the Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
“There is clear recognition as to the importance of having specialist nursing support to run an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) Service with a help line and proactive coordinated care,” she wrote.
“All agree as to the benefits of this approach and both improved health outcomes and cost efficiencies have been demonstrated.”
She said that while a “really important group of people” were being sidelined to chronic illness unnecessarily because of the lack of access to ongoing care, clinicians were also feeling the pressure.
“It’s something that all the IBD services in Australia are up in arms about – everyone is having such difficulty getting IBD nurses,” she said. “There’s a real cry-out for these positions to be funded.
“A lot of people who work in high end IBD services are feeling burned out.”
Specialists were getting beyond frustrated, she said.
“I’m quite close to resigning from the public system if we can’t get some movement on this thing,” she said.