New equipment heading to Base

STAFF at Ballarat Base Hospital received a visit from Minister for Health Infrastructure, Mary-Anne Thomas earlier this week, who announced the arrival of new equipment.

Seven new anaesthesia machines and accompanying monitoring devices are on the way for the health service, which Ms Thomas said will be a boost for surgeries in the region.

“A health service like Ballarat… plays a critical role in helping us meet our targets,” she said. “Part of delivering that is in ensuring the equipment available in our hospitals is fit for purpose.

“[The new machines are] important because… we have had equipment failure sometimes as a cause for cancellation. Investing in this means we can be much more certain the surgeries that are planned will be able to go ahead.”

The new equipment has been funded with more than $916,000 as part of the eighth round of the State Government’s Regional Health Infrastructure Fund.

Established in 2016, the program has since paid for $790 million worth of upgrades to hospitals in regional Victoria.

Of the new anaesthetic equipment, one will be located at Ballarat Base Hospital’s catheter laboratory while the remaining will be in the operating theatre suites.

The health service’s director of anaesthetics Greg Henderson said the new machines are another step forward for their operations.

“It just allows us to be more able to deliver a variety of types of anaesthesia and better anaesthesia for more challenging patients,” he said.

“We’ve been moving into robotic surgery which does cause more stress on patients physiologically… and we’re doing a lot more progressive surgery.

“It allows us to safely transfer patients through the hospital much more easily because the modules on those machines can actually be removed and transferred from one area to another instantaneously.”