Co-Location is Vital
14 January 2006
One of the most unsettling issues to return to after a
Christmas-New Year break, was the deepening controversy over the
location of the new Coast hospital.
The vision outlined by the Premier when officially announcing the
hospital at Sippy Downs seems to be contradicted by media reports
of interviews with Health Minister Stephen Robertson.
The vital part of the Premier's original announcement has even
more force today than it did last May, because various reports on
our health system have exposed major weaknesses in bureaucratic
management and clinical practices in Queensland that have to be
dealt with at a sustained intellectual level.
Best practice is occurring internationally where cooperating
organisations are co-located. This is nowhere more obvious than in
university-hospital co-location and collaboration.
The Health Minister's website still has a media release on it,
posted on 17 November 2005, which states 'We still intend to build
a state-of-the-art 21st Century tertiary hospital on land adjacent
to the University campus at Sippy Downs'.
This is exactly the philosophy that the Premier outlined and is
consistent with world best practice.
Co-location remains the overwhelmingly important criterion for a
range of urgently needed professional courses to be generated, and
for high quality inter-professional research to be conducted.
Co-location enhances collaboration in a way that universities
and hospitals, even then minutes apart, can never do.
Consider some examples. Firstly, the UK's top-ranked Cambridge
University, at which I spent some time in December, specifically
promotes ways in which Cambridge 'embeds' businesses and hospital
activities into the fabric of its academic pursuits, and buildings
of its University.
The mission of the Cambridge University Hospitals Trust is to
generate a dynamic interaction between clinical care, education,
research and economic contribution. To make this happen, the key
component is, in their words, 'The physical co-location of these
activities on a shared campus'.
In the United States there is a plethora of co-located
universities and hospitals, together producing some of the finest
advances in medical practice.
The University of California, San Francisco, for example, has a
fifteen-year project to develop and integrate speciality hospitals
into the University.
The Dean of Harvard Medical School has said that scientific
collaboration occurs best through co-location, and he is already
seeing positive results of that strategy because three significant
recent collaborations are occurring between the university and
hospital staffs because they are 'colleagues who are now just a
floor away or down the hall'.
Even in Australia this logic is being introduced, for example
between the University of Tasmania and the Royal Hobart
Hospital.
If the Sunshine Coast can experience a new University growing in
concert with a new co-located hospital in an imaginatively planned
new township, then we will not only have reflected the Premier's
stated vision, but have embarked on creating something of world
class on the Coast.
Master planning has shown that what problems remain, can be
overcome, and it would be a lost opportunity if we were diverted
from the compelling logic of excellence that accompanies
co-location.
Professor Paul Thomas is Vice-Chancellor of University of
the Sunshine Coast