Adjournment - Dr Brian Herman - Non-Renewal of Contract

Tuesday 23 June 2026

[7.56 p.m.] Ms ARMITAGE (Launceston) - Thank you, Mr President, and obviously it is a little late hour, but I believe this adjournment speech is necessary. Members may recall my presenting a special interest speech recently on interventional cardiologist Associate Professor Brian Herman in recent weeks. There's now a bewildering matter that has struck a deep chord across northern Tasmania, which is the Tasmanian Health Service's non-renewal of Dr Herman's contract at the Launceston General Hospital.

This has not been treated by the community as a minor internal staffing matter. It's been felt very deeply by the many people who have come into contact with Dr Herman, with the patient or family member. Professor Brian Herman is not simply one cardiologist among many; he's an internationally respected interventional cardiologist who spent more than two decades serving the people of northern Tasmania and is now travelling from Hobart to Launceston to provide an extremely specialised service. He has also treated patients in the north-west.

Interventional cardiology is not routine medicine. It's technically demanding, high-risk work carried out in life-and-death situations where the clinician's judgment, experience and steady hands can mean the difference between a family celebrating another Christmas together or enduring the grief of an empty chair at the table. That's why the community reaction has been so strong. When word spread that Associate Professor Herman had been told his approximately 0.1 FTE or two-day-a-month contract at the Launceston General Hospital would not be renewed, people did not respond as though this were a normal workplace change. Hundreds of comments flooded social media.

Former patients and family spoke publicly, many in deeply emotional terms, about what this man has meant to them. Many others reflected that Dr Herman had once saved their life or that of a loved one, and most questioned how it could possibly make sense to lose a doctor whose reputation and expertise is not easily replaced. That kind of outpouring does not happen unless a community feels something precious is being put at risk. When we look at the stories behind that public response, it's impossible not to feel the weight of what's at stake.

From The Examiner newspaper article of 17 June 2026, one woman, Mardy Powell, spoke of her husband suffering a heart attack and urgently needing stents inserted. Melbourne specialists decided not to operate because the risk was too high. They were sent back to Launceston and Dr Herman agreed to take a chance. He successfully inserted three stents and told them that without that intervention, her husband had only days left before another devastating heart attack. Mrs Powell said she was forever thankful because his work gave them another 14 months together, time they otherwise would not have had. Not a statistic, not a line item - 14 extra months of conversations, meals, birthdays, and ordinary moments that become priceless when you know they might have been lost.

From the same article, Kim Brundle-Lawrence told of watching her husband Peter flatline during an ultrasound. She thought the monitor had frozen. In an instant, the room became an emergency. Dr Herman happened to be there. He helped bring Peter back. Then later, after Peter passed away, Mrs Brundle-Lawrence herself suffered a major angina attack. Dr Herman inserted two stents and she says she's doing fine today.

That's not abstract policy. That's a doctor standing at the junction between fear and hope, between crisis and survival. What makes this even harder for me to understand is that the explanation offered has sounded bureaucratic at a time when people were crying out for clinical common sense. Dr Herman was told his contract would not be renewed as part of a process to clean up part-time roles and move toward a full-time position. We're told an additional full-time cardiologist position has been created across both clinical and head of department roles at the Launceston General Hospital.

That's good news, but why would you force out a highly specialised interventional cardiologist before the role has been filled? Wouldn't it be more sensible to wait until the new head of the cardiology department is employed and commences to allow him or her to determine the best staffing setup for the department, rather than a decision made by bureaucrats? Interventional cardiology is one of the most technically demanding areas of medicine. It requires years, often decades, of training and experience. In regional Tasmania, people with those skills do not simply appear because the position is advertised.

They are rare and they are valuable. When you have one, I don't believe you push them aside lightly. There's also broader concern here. Dr Herman's role has not only been about treating patients one by one, though that alone would be enough to merit serious respect. Public material about his work notes that he has helped build cardiac capability in the north and has supported advanced training, with the Launceston General Hospital's cardiology program recognised as the only fully accredited three-year cardiology training program in a regional hospital in Australia.

At the same time, the government is promoting the future northern heart centre, a major expansion of cardiac services at the Launceston General Hospital, including a new inpatient unit and cardiac catheterisation labs. If that's the future we're building, then existing specialist expertise should be treasured.

You do not talk about strengthening cardiac care in one breath and undermine proven specialist capacity in the next. At its heart, this issue is about more than one doctor, though one doctor has become the symbol of it. It's about ensuring that there are no gaps in care and that we value the contributions of our medical teams to excel in both patient care and medical teaching, inspiring and training the next generation of doctors.

Northern Tasmanians deserve confidence that critical cardiac care will remain available close to home. They deserve decision-making that's careful, considered and clinically informed. It's my sincere hope that this matter can be resolved quickly, with Dr Herman doing what he does best, saving lives, at least until the new cardiology department staffing decision can be made by the new permanent full-time Head of Cardiology and that the Launceston General Hospital will continue to be a centre of excellence for northern Tasmania.