Catholic conference reimagines health care

By Tim Johnston

The first day of Catholic Health Australia’s annual conference Rejoice, Reimagine has focussed on the human dimension of health care and the importance of ensuring we never lose sight of compassion and connectedness as we grapple with the pressures of economics, resources and technology.

London bombing survivor, Dr Gill Hicks spoke movingly of how her experience as a survivor of a 2005 terrorist attack showed her that the things that unite us are more important than those that divide us, and encouraged her to throw herself into healing the rifts that breed hate.

Although she spent six months in hospital recovering from injuries she received on the morning in July, she spoke not of the medical procedures that healed her body but of the sense of love and community that healed her soul.

She told a rapt audience in Sydney of the immediate sense of connection among the disparate victims as they lay in a dark, shattered carriage of a London Underground train calling to each other while waiting for help to arrive.

“Survival wasn’t about me, survival was about us,” she said, and spoke of feeling “the unconditional love from each of the hands that touched my body” as she was passed from rescuer to rescuer back to the surface.

Speaking shortly after Dr Hicks, Professor Stephen Duckett – health economist, theologian, and former secretary of the Department of Health and Ageing – took a different route to arrive at a similar destination. He used the parable of the Good Samaritan as a starting point for a compelling argument that without the fellow feeling for a fellow human being that is compassion, the robbed traveller would not have survived.

At a time when we are all being asked to do more with less, Professor Duckett pointed out that “a sole focus on efficiency might squeeze out the ability to provide compassionate care” and that any metric of success that did not factor in a dimension of ‘kindness’ – however hard that might be to capture on a spreadsheet – would fail to give an accurate measure of success or failure.

Reinforcing the human dimension of health care is central to this year’s CHA conference. The theme of Rejoice, Reimagine is focused on the broader challenges facing the health care industry in general and the aged care industry in particular, but views the challenges through the prism of a 185-year history of the Catholic mission in Australia, particularly when it comes to ensuring that those on the margins get the care they need and deserve.

Pictured above: Dr Gill Hicks delivering the opening plenary