Hervey Bay Gossip

On Saturday an 84 year old great grandmother was flown to Brisbane for treatment to a broken elbow. It seems that there were no surgeons available in any of the three hospitals in the region.

The Courier Mail is reporting today that more than 20 hjospitals across Queensland have closed or reduced services due to the current shortage of doctors.

Maryborough and Hervey Bay Hospitals are among those 20 and both hospitals are reported to have cut elective surgery schedules because of a lack of specialists.

If you’re pregnant, near term and live in Emerald then you have a real problem because maternity services have been suspended.

While most of us think that the whale watching season is well and truly over in Hervey Bay there is one whale out there that must have missed the memo.

Over the last four to five days a whale has been sighted in the Great Sandy Straight around Urangan Pier and south from there.

While humpbacks rarely come as far south in the bay as Point Vernon this one, which is thought to be a Bryde’s whale, has gone where no whale has gone before.

If it is a Bryde’s whale then we can expect to see it around Hervey Bay for some time to come. Bryde’s whales prefer to stay in warmer waters and live by hunting schools of fish rather than travelling south to the Krill fields around Antarctica.

Yesterday at one stage the whale could be seen from the deck of Viva Italia.

It seems as though we healthy people in Hervey Bay have only 10 more days before it’s our turn to see the Hospital’s emegency department close due to lack of doctors.

There is some talk of the local GPs stepping to keep the department open but nothing seems to be set in concrete yet.

I wonder if our illustrious local member is out looking for a new job yet?

The chances of him being re-elected are growing slimmer by the day.

Since the introduction of the digital camera the photographic industry has been going through some very painful times as it reshapes itself to cope with the new technology.

Some manufacturers have been facing some very tough times and Konica Minolta (which came into being in 2003 when the two companies merged) has decided to call it quits.

It was announced today that the company has sold it’s camera business to Sony and it will close it’s colour film and colour paper business in 2007.

Konica Minolta will not be disappearing entirely, instead it plans to focus on photocopiers and medical imaging equipment.

One thing that we have noticed since moving to Hervey Bay is the number of home based businesses there are around town. In our street alone there are are least three and that’s not counting the plumber or the builder.

Running a business from home certainly has it’s advantages and more and more people are doing it. However, running a business from home is still relatively uncommon and some companies that provide services that home based businesses use are still not attuned to the special needs of small businesses that operate from home.

Insurance is one of those industries as we learnt this week. Now we accept that in this situation the problem was ours. We did not take the time to check thoroughly to see if our contents policy really did cover all the contents and it didn’t.

But at the same time the consultant who handled our policy when we first signed up did not explain that some contents may not be covered at all. And this is how we found out.

These days laptops come equipped with internal wi-fi cards but as recently as a couple of years ago, when we bought our latest laptop, wi-fi was new technology and internal cards were yet to be thought of.

When we moved to wi-fi for our home based business we bought a wi-fi network card for this laptop that plugs into a port on the side of the machine and over the last 12 months it has worked very well.

At the same time we have had all our equipment included in our household insurance. Our insurance company was quite happy to include our computers because we could legitimately say that every one of them was used, in very small part, for private use.

As far as the insurance company was concerned it didn’t really matter how much they were used for private use and their only criteria for establishing that it was for private use was if there were games installed on the computers and - being computer geeks - of course there were.

So that was the situation on Monday morning … when I dropped the laptop and of course it fell on the side where the wireless card was plugged in. After the fall the wireless card was pushed much further in than it normally goes.

I powered up the laptop and it worked, I tried to access the network and it didn’t work - time to call the insurance company.

The bad news was that our insurance company (RACQ - a very reputable company here in Queensland) does not cover anything for accidental damage if the policy is for goods situated in a house that is leased - we lease.

The company does not cover laptops for accidental damage, even if they are listed as a specified item, if they are used for business.

The moral of the story is - check your insurance policies item by item because the cover you think you have may not really be there at all.

It seems that parts of Hervey Bay were blacked out for some very short period last night but it was certainly strangely selective.

Some of the computers here in Gossip headquarters were shut down and others didn’t and in at least one other part of town a householder found that an airconditioner on one side of the house shut down while the one on the other side of the house didn’t. At the same time a clock-radio continued to work on the side of the house where the airconditioner stopped while on the side of the house where the airconditioner continued to function the clock-radio stopped.

The problems the State government is having over the hospital crisis just goes on getting worse and there are times when it seems that even the “Yes Minister” crew could do a better job of running the state.

The Minister is now blaming his department for providing him with incorrect information about just how serious the problem at Caboolture was going to. The Minister told the public that the emergency department at Caboolture Hospital would remain open but of course we all know that isn’t the way it turned out.

So to cover his bum the Minister is now releasing departmental notes to show that he was given the wrong information.

Somehow this all smacks of the incompetent leading the incapable.

Will this problem ever get better? Probably not - we can always vote the pollies out of office but how do you sort out a mess like the Health Departmnet?

Yesterday the Hervey Bay Gossip reported that the Real Estate Institute of Queensland still sees Hervey Bay as a great place to invest in real estate.

After that story was posted I had a chance to speak to someone involved in the rental side of real estate here in Hervey Bay. Their appraisal of the situation is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find tenants for all the rental properties in Hervey Bay and even more difficult to find good tenants.

As one commentator on yesterday’s story said:

It appears obvious (yet again) that anyone connected with real estate needs to perpetuate the hype!

The spin merchants are obviously working overtime down in the Queensland Health Department at the moment.

The Federal Government has decided to take a look to see if closing the Caboolture Hospital’s emergecny unit hasn’t placed Queensland in breach of the Medicare agreement.

The Federal Government says tha patients have been turned away. The Minister for Health say that no patients were turned away, they were just advised to go to another hospital emergency department.

Wouldn’t it be great if all those who have some control of this fiasco at State level stopped wasting time with words and got on and solved the problem?

Of course, I still believe in the tooth fairy.