Death took a national half-holiday in Australia in 2007 but not on the NSW North Coast. Make a memo, Premier Rees & Health Minister Tebutt

While you and your ministers are riding your party towards factional ruin, Premier Rees, please spare a thought for the fact that NSW Government health policy is also shuffling our family members off this mortal coil faster than we would like here on the NSW North Coast.
Nationally it seems that for every birth around two minutes later there's a death, but I remember some years where total births and deaths were running neck and neck in places like the Clarence Valley, so I expect that the North Coast has a higher number of older people than many other parts of the state and therefore we might expect some differences to show.
However I have to class it as passing strange that.......
In 2007 when the nation was enjoying longer life expectancy and a decline in the crude death rate with record low numbers for three years in a row, the Clarence Valley's death rate rose to 476 souls out of a population of about 50,542, taking it above the national standardised death rate.
Deaths also rose in the Byron, Coffs Harbour, Richmond Valley, Tweed and Kyogle areas.
That's more people falling off the perch in 6 out of 8 North Coast council areas than had died in the previous year according to this ABS spread sheet.
Not something to be proud of Premier, when your North Coast Area Health Service had been relentlessly cost-cutting and downsizing over those very same years.
From what I can gather, the national death rate is on the increase once again this year and (along with the fact that lower socio-economic status means worse health outcomes and this region certainly has more people per capita on low incomes than the big cities) that doesn't bode well for our local communities.
Now The Daily Examiner tells us that Maclean District Hospital right in the middle of a retiree belt has just lost 6 more beds reducing overall bed numbers to 36 beds:
"The surge model allows beds to be closed during periods of low demand and reopened when needed.
But the doctor said that was not how the system was working last week, the problem being that the staff needed to attend those six beds were not rostered on and therefore the beds could not be used.
"We've always understood that surge beds could be subject to open time to time but on Friday we were told they were gone forever and we should consider ourselves a 36-bed hospital," the doctor said.
While he acknowledged the hospital had a high number of spare beds for a couple of days, he said that was part of the normal turnaround and patient numbers could fluctuate greatly.
Even still, he said the 11 spare beds was an exception and usually the hospital was full.
He said Maclean was an area experiencing significant population growth and the hospital needed more beds, not less, and the real motivation behind the move was to cut staff.
While that may be okay for a large hospital, for a small community hospital it was deadly, he said.
"We're operating on a skeleton crew as it is and it's dangerous. We've already been cut to the bone - we don't have any fat left to cut," he said.
He said he was only speaking out because he was angry cost-cutting was being put before the needs of patients and the community.
"We are there to service the community and how can we do that when we are turning people away?"
Not a great position to be in, Premier, and one that's getting many of us a bit hot under the collar up here on the NSW North Coast and just itching to front a polling booth.