Health professionals want details of where the extra money will be spent and for it to be recurrent funding.

The Australian Medical Association, which had called for urgent extra funding for Tasmania’s over stretched hospitals, said it had not received any details, only that the money would be spent on staff not beds.

AMA state president Dr John Davis said the recruitment of additional staff to treat patients, improve safety in emergency departments and reduce access block was “paramount.”

“The AMA calls on the Minister to write the cheque today and authorise and resource the hospital leadership teams to get on with the job,” Dr Davis said.

“Local management knows best what is needed within the individual facilities to urgently manage the patient loads.

“In order to help our over stretched hospital staff and their patients the Minister needs to allow management to recruit the reinforcements they need to deal with the steadily rising level of hospital emergency demand.”

Dr Davis said Health Minister Michael Ferguson should also remove any red tape or unhelpful and unnecessary bureaucracy that was standing in the way of the running of hospitals by the leadership teams.

Health and Community Services Union secretary Tim Jacobson said the funding would only address the $100m deficit which was outlined in a recent KPMG report.

He said because it was not recurrent funding it would not address the shortfall in future years.

“This announcement is just another band aid,” Mr Jacobson said.

“What health and community services staff want to see is a plan.

“Staff are exhausted, and a one-off injection of funds won’t provide any confidence that future demand will be resolved.

“Health and community services staff are already feeling undervalued by this government, I’m not sure of they will feel any better after this announcement. It’s welcome relief for the health accountants but not great news if you are on the front line.”

Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation state secretary Emily Shepherd welcomed the additional funds but said it would not address the shortfall that recurrent funding had created over the last four years.

“The ANMF look forward to further details as to how this additional funding will be used and whether this funding will be recurrent to assist with implementation of sustainable strategies to support the health system and nurses, midwives and patients both now and into the future,” Ms Shepherd said.

Health analyst Martyn Goddard said the $105 million would not alleviate the current pressures on hospitals.

“The $105 million in ‘extra’ health funding announced does not give hospitals any ability to spend more money than they already are. It’s a bit of an accounting trick,” Mr Goddard said.

He said the health sector had to be topped up every year and the funding was what was called for in a KPMG report.

“The recent KPMG and RDME reports showed that the funding gap between the allocation in the budget and the minimum amount that actually needed to be spent was around $100 million. That’s what this is,” Mr Goddard said.

“Under-estimating health costs in the budget makes the surplus look better.

“If there was $105 million in genuinely new money going into health, the government would be able to tell us the specifics of what it would be spent on. They haven’t because they can’t.”

Labor health spokesperson Sarah Lovell said the funding would not fix the “health crisis.”

“Here we see a panicked funding injection which is just a short term fix and doesn’t go anywhere near to addressing the problems in the long term,” Ms Lovell said.

“We have many unanswered questions that the Premier failed to answer in Parliament today including who the Government consulted with before announcing this funding, what exactly the funding will be used for, will it be used to employ more staff?

“The Government has known about this chronic funding shortfall since it received the KPMG report 18 months ago, so why did it take so long to act?”