Well it seems that we have opened up a can of worms when we asked you to send in your stories about health!

We can´t print all the things that were said to us. Sadly, the bad outweighs the good and this speaks to the fact that the state government run health systems in this country are in crisis. In Victoria, it would appear that like the train system the health system needs a major injection of funds just to patch up the cracks that exist.

On the one hand there are stories of mistakes or misunderstandings like paperwork that goes missing but on the other, one lady spoke of how her mother went into a private hospital with a broken hip and ended up with a broken shoulder because the sides of the bed were not put up. It begs the question who is going to pay those bills?

Another spoke of taking her mother home because of lack of "care"! Other people have talked of being left without pain relief and of nurses going out to dance parties and then turning up to work. It is true that people are still complaining about discrimination!

Clearly there is a brain drain effect happening. The low wages paid to nurses and the stress of over crowded under resourced wards means that people are asking if the good nurses have left the system. Yes, it is true if you pay peanuts then you get monkies. But how to fix the systematic problems?

Perhaps we need "Nurse Watch", but with teeth? Clearly the governments, who are responsible for the system, our care, and who reap the profits, need to do something to attract quality nurses back into the system. Further, those nurses that are badly organised and sleeping on the job need to be encouraged to "move on"!

A national register needs to be established upon which the names of nurses found to have harmed patients can be listed to ensure that their work practices do not further compromise patient safety. And perhaps, given that it is human lives that are effected, it is time for compulsory random drug testing to weed out those people who are not interested in serving, "we the people". After all it is the patients who are ultimately paying the wages.

And yes, we at Fagmedia think it is time for the Commonwealth to take over the running of under performing state services. If we stop the "middle men" skimming off the profits and inject those funds back into the system then perhaps then we might truly have the first class health care we deserve and are paying for.