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Catholic Health Australia looks beyond efficiency to healing

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CATHOLIC HEALTH AUSTRALIA CONFERENCE: Hyatt Regency Sydney, 27 August 2024.

There is a curious aspect to the current debate around health care.

Discussions of this most visceral—in all senses—of professions tend to be curiously bloodless, revolving around the wages of workers, the expense of new drugs and new treatments, or the cost of insurance.

As speaker after speaker told Catholic Health Australia’s recent annual conference in Sydney, “humanity” is in danger of being squeezed out of the debate about this most human of pursuits.

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Health care is about more than resources, and patients are more than outputs. Catholic health care recognises that a patient is more than a collection of physical ailments: as a person of value and dignity made in the likeness of God, it is not enough to treat their physical health in isolation of their spiritual and emotional needs.

Every physical ailment creates an emotional wound. This is why qualities of kindness, compassion and empathy need to be at the heart of everything we do in health and aged care, extending care beyond the physical realm to promote social, spiritual, and psychological healing.

Jenny Parker Jae Smith Adrian Wilson. CATHOLIC HEALTH AUSTRALIA CONFERENCE: Hyatt Regency Sydney, 27 August 2024.

The theme of the recent conference was “Rejoice, Reimagine.” If the rejoicing was around the astonishing work for people in need of care that the CHA network continues to deliver despite the challenges, most of the reimagining was focussed on how a mission-based approach applies to today’s needs, and into the future.

It is one of the many advantages of a faith-based mission that acknowledgement of a divine creator can help care services remain focused on these most basic aspects of humanity.

We can all learn from what analysts call the “streetlight effect,” named after our natural bias towards looking for lost keys under a streetlight not because they are more likely to be there but because that’s where we’re more likely to be able to see them. In broader terms, it refers to our tendency to focus on available data, even if it’s not the most relevant or useful for solving the actual problem.

So, while modern health care compulsively measures metrics like staffing ratios, therapeutic cost, and ALOS (Average Lenth of Stay), intangibles like compassion and empathy—the factors that cannot be easily counted, categorised and consigned to a spreadsheet—risk being ignored.

The lodestar around which much of the conference discussion revolved was the idea that in terms of healing, the physical aspects of medicine are incomplete without the leavening humanity of the spiritual side.

CATHOLIC HEALTH AUSTRALIA CONFERENCE: Dr Gill Hicks . Rejoicing in life, survival and reimagining purpose, Hyatt Regency Sydney, 27 August 2024.

The tone was set by Dr Gill Hicks in her Keynote address. Dr Hicks, who spent months in hospital after losing her legs in the 2005 London terror bombings, talked a little about the medical side of her journey and a lot about the healing powers of human connection, from the nourishing words of her fellow victims as they lay in the dark of the shattered carriage—“Survival wasn’t about me, survival was about us”—to the empathy of a nurse who normalised the strangeness of her first post-trauma shower by climbing in with her fully clothed.

Professor Stephen Duckett deconstructed the parable of the Good Samaritan to conclude that the essential lesson was the value of compassion. He went on to point out that although the innkeeper had a duty not to waste money when he was caring for the recovering traveller, “a sole focus on efficiency might squeeze out our compassion,” as he put it.

Left implied was the idea that if unchecked by compassion, a focus on efficiency risks leading down a corrosive path to the logical conclusion that the cost-benefit analysis of some patients doesn’t stack up: they are literally not worth saving.

The faith-fuelled commitment to recognising the dignity of all through compassion, kindness and empathy is not just a brake preventing us from doing the wrong thing, but also an inspiration to practice a more complete vision of health care.

catholic healthcare
CATHOLIC HEALTH AUSTRALIA CONFERENCE: Plenary: Emeritus Professor Dr Stephen Duckett AM. Christian ethics and funding: celebrating our ethical traditions to reimagine priority settings in healthcare, Hyatt Regency Sydney, 27 August 2024.

Notably, the mission-based approach to health care encourages a greater focus on those at the margins of society. Sister Clare Nolan rsc spoke movingly at the conference of how St Vincent’s in Sydney was drawn into caring for AIDS victims at the beginning of the crisis; Andrew Padayachy used his own experience as both a patient and a peer worker in the forensic mental health system to sketch how all too often the treatment of those experiencing mental illness in the prison system was more about the convenience of the institution than the health or dignity of the patient; and a panel discussed the corrosive impact of loneliness, particularly for older people.

For almost a century after European settlement, faith-based institutions had a near-monopoly on Australia’s front-line health and aged care, and as the system becomes ever more  corporatised and impersonal, CHA’s conference was a timely reminder that we still have a key role to play in ensuring that not only should everyone get the care they need, but also of the importance of responding to our own call to mission by treating patients and residents as people rather than a person-shaped assemblage of medical symptoms.

Brigid is Director of Strategy and Mission at Catholic Health Australia. 

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