Page 1447 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 26 September 1989
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My colleague Mr Humphries gave a few examples from Dr Kearney's report about the price of beds in different hospitals. Let me just point out something in particular about the price of beds, because Dr Kearney pointed to the fact that the beds at Royal Canberra Hospital per unit were much more expensive than those at Woden Valley and Calvary. He did not actually associate it with what he had himself put earlier in his study, that when you go to a principal hospital concept or when you have a hospital that does major surgery and has major functions, then obviously the price of those beds is going to be much more expensive. So while Calvary Hospital serves as a community hospital, you would expect those beds per unit to be much less expensive. We must keep that very much in mind as we consider the sort of decision that should be made on our hospital system.
We should also consider that such decisions should not be made on a dollar basis alone. We should take the report of the steering committee, we should look at what is the cheapest option, and then we can take the sort of solution that people take in their homes. We do not always buy the cheapest, because often the cheapest or the one that saves us the most money is also the shonkiest system and could well leave us with something inadequate.
Dr Kearney's recommendation which gave the direction to the steering committee was to look at a principal hospital of 600 to 700 beds. I suggest that that is where the compromise could well lie. It could well be that we would save ourselves a great deal of money. It could well be that we would come up with a much better hospital system, even if it is not the optimum one that Dr Kearney would like to have seen, if our principal hospital is a hospital of either 400 or 500 beds. If that is the case, it may well be that we can retain the Royal Canberra Hospital as a principal hospital, as the teaching hospital. It may well be - and I am, as Mr Humphries said I would do, presenting just another option that must be considered - that we will not have to redevelop Woden Valley Hospital at all, and the money we save from one may well be used in order to develop the other. That is a real option that is not canvassed by the committee.
Whatever our options on the hospital, the Residents Rally will not consider the possibility of closing down Royal Canberra Hospital as a major community hospital. We will never consider that at all. Our preference is to see the Royal Canberra Hospital as the principal hospital. One of the difficulties we have had in trying to assess this is trying to put our hands on the facts and figures.
It was with that in mind that last Friday - and, granted, the Minister has not had much time because it was late Friday afternoon - I wrote to him. He had already agreed to provide a briefing. In writing to him, I asked for the following figures. I wanted costing figures done by the same firm that has presented them, TGP&PON. I have yet to
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