Page 1034 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 1990
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Mr Berry: Some of them never had it, tell the truth.
MR HUMPHRIES: Well, maybe so. But the fact is that one hospital in our system, Mr Berry, which would have remained seriously under-utilised under your proposals, does have full accreditation. For some time Calvary Hospital has had the highest level of accreditation available to any hospital in Australia and yet - - -
Mr Berry: For a hospital of its level.
MR HUMPHRIES: It is a very good hospital, Mr Berry; it has a very high standard and I am sorry that you will not admit that in public. Furthermore, Mr Deputy Speaker, when we, as an Alliance Government, took over responsibility for the hospital in the Territory, we faced, on top of that serious run-down problem, a $7m hospital budget blowout - $7m. Yet now we see surprise and angst on the part of members opposite that hard medicine needs to be administered. All I can say is that that is a very strange diagnosis of the disease.
The fact is that Canberra needs certain things. One thing it needs is a principal hospital - Mr Berry conceded that when he was in government. A principal hospital, of course, provides the range of services and it concentrates specialities on the one site so that people can be confident that the services they may need in acute cases or in cases of particular complication can be available on that one site. That is a very important addition to the community's medical facilities.
I admit that it took some time for me to be convinced that we really needed a principal hospital. I spoke to a great many doctors across the system; I spoke to administrators; I even spoke to unionists, believe it or not, Mr Berry. The consensus was that Canberra needed such a facility and that is, I think, taken for granted. So the ACT Government decided that it would provide a principal hospital - and that applied both to this Government and the previous Government.
The choice was very obvious. Of the two major ACT hospitals, clearly, Royal Canberra is more run down and has been more neglected. Clearly, Woden Valley was, by far, the better candidate for development of a principal hospital. Then having established Woden Valley as a principal hospital, the issue arose as to whether the ACT could afford the additional cost of providing two further general hospitals with general care provisions in them. To any rational person the answer would have to be, no, it could not support the costs of those additional hospitals.
The Government has decided, as everyone is well aware, to provide two public hospitals in the ACT - a principal hospital on the Woden Valley site with about 700 beds and a general hospital on the Calvary site of about 300 beds.
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