Aboriginal death sparks inquiry call

THE Australian Medical Association has called for a royal commission on the state of Aboriginal health care in the Northern Territory because of the death of a man left alone at a remote airstrip.

The Aboriginal elder, 78, was flown home to Kalkaringi, about 600 kilometres south of Darwin, on August 21 after being treated at the Katherine Hospital.

He had no escort on the chartered flight and there was no one to meet him when he arrived.

His body was found in bushland near the airstrip one week later, after police abandoned their search.

The AMA's territory president, Paul Bauert, said institutionalised racism was partly responsible for poor health care in remote communities.

Deaths resulting from shoddy paperwork and organisation were just the tip of the iceberg. "There's a concern that a lot of things are rushed just in an effort to expedite the emptying of hospitals and getting people home on weekends," he said.

"It has happened before. People have been put on buses with nobody to meet them."

The NT Government and Coroner have launched investigations into the circumstances surrounding the death, while the man's niece, Josie Crawshaw-Guy, has accused the Health Department of racism.

"Too much of this institutional racism has been happening," she said.

"It is hard-core, systemic racism."

Her uncle was almost blind and could not walk unaided, she said.

"I can't begin to imagine how terrifying it must have been for him."

Dr Bauert said he had heard stories about patients being stopped from boarding buses to clinics and regional hospitals because they were not wearing shoes.

One source working in Aboriginal health in the NT said indigenous patients were often treated inhumanely.

"They aren't bags of wheat, these are people," he said.

"They are being treated less than charitably at times."

Dr Bauert said the NT Government should operate a centralised patient transfer system, rather than relying on private charter companies to move sick people to and from medical services.

A spokesman for the Health Department said a preliminary review of its patient transfers "over a number of years" had identified no other deaths related to transfer arrangements.

But checks have revealed at least one other case of a bungled patient transfer investigated by the NT Coroner in the past three years. In early November 2001, a 67-year-old man with dementia and severe acidosis and hyperkalemia — too much potassium in the blood — was put on a bus from Darwin Hospital to Katherine without an escort.

He was later found by relatives under a tree, dressed in his hospital pyjamas, near the tourist information centre in Katherine.

His only possession was a bus ticket, the coronial report noted.

He died in the Katherine Hospital from acute renal failure three weeks later.

There are about 8000 patient transfers, mostly by plane, each year in the NT to small, remote communities.

As a result of the death last month of the Aboriginal elder, the NT Health Department has vowed to tighten transfer procedures.

Rather than just faxing details of patient itineraries to their local clinics, the department will now follow up with a telephone call.

AAP