Health Insurance

I am currently on a neuro prac placement at Joondalup Hospital. I have never been to joondalup hospital prior to this and it is all very new to me (unlike SCGH) where we have been a thousand times. Joondalup Hospital mainly runs east west and has west wings and east wings. In general they reserve the west wings for private health care patients and the east wings for public health care patients.

Due to the fact that there are different sections of the hospital there are different charges that apply if you're in the private as apposed to the public section. Mostly the public section runs the same as other hospitals and you see people needing physio as often as possible, and while gaining consent is a must, you are almost advised to bribe them into agreeing sometimes.

I am located on the private section and it's very different. People who have private health cover may not have physio coverage and in this sense you kind of need to respect their choice as to whether or not they get physio a little more because they will get a very large bill at the end of their stay if they have had services that aren't covered.

I had an elderly patient who presented with a facial droop and slurring of speech. She had two strokes 20 years earlier and consequently her level of function prior to her admission this time was wheel chair bound but independent with transferring by using her unaffected arm and leg. We wanted to assess if she had any motor deficits from the most recent stroke that would affect her performing her transfers but she flat out refused for a few days in a row and we couldn't ascertain whether she would be safe at home prior to her discharging herself.

There were also a couple of patients this week that were holidaying here, visiting their children and had strokes whilst in Australia. It means they have to hope their travel insurance will cover all the allied health services that the hospital provides.

It puts you in a bit of a tricky situation as i found myself hesitating before treating a man from overseas who had a very dense stroke as his son had not ascertained yet whether the travel insurance would cover any of the costs. It took me a while to explain to my curtin supervisor that it wasn't that i had written him off as having no hope for rehab but that i knew his son was waiting on his father to be stable before flying him home where they have staff employed in their homes to do all the cooking/cleaning/washing etc. and it was more that i didn't want to visit this man, only to find that he could barely sit again and then send his family a bill for that when he would be leaving in a day or two and has care already organised.