Page 868 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 27 March 1990
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beds would be able to provide the same comprehensive range of general hospital services.
However, there is a scarcity of highly specialised staff in Canberra - for example, in areas such as coronary care, intensive care, neonatal intensive care and renal services. Where specialists are required to see patients across three differing hospital sites the patient in a less frequently visited hospital will not have access to the same standard of care as those in the hospital where the specialist is based.
As I have already said, Mr Speaker, the development of the principal hospital will assist in collocating the specialists so that better treatment of patients with multiple symptoms can occur. However, providing care over a further two sites, as opposed to one, would lead to a lower quality of service, given the scarce resources available.
As hospitals clearly develop their own styles of operation, a further consideration is that of choice of style available between three hospitals or two hospitals. In my view, where a comprehensive range of services is available at two hospitals, retaining a third for a choice of philosophy or style alone would not be an overall deciding factor for maintaining all three hospitals.
If the Government were to decide that only one general hospital site would be developed, the lowest cost option by far is to transfer Royal Canberra Hospital to the Woden Valley site to create the principal hospital while developing Calvary as a 300-bed general hospital. This scheme would involve all up capital costs of $154m and produce recurrent savings of about $8.5m per annum at existing levels of service.
The Woden Valley-Calvary option would involve providing a comprehensive general hospital service at Calvary. This would ensure that most of the needs of the people in north Canberra would be met locally. There may be concern that Calvary Hospital will not provide particular services for medico-moral reasons. While this is true, in practice it involves only a very small number of procedures, such as abortion and tubal ligations. On the other hand, it is important to recognise that the philosophy and style of care offered by Calvary Hospital is highly valued by those who have experienced its services until now. In full operation, these services will be available to a much larger group of people.
Maintaining three hospitals, with Royal Canberra on its current site at around 250 beds and Calvary up to 150 beds, as was proposed by the previous Government, would have construction costs around $50m to $60m more than the Woden-Calvary proposal, and cost at least $3.5m per annum more to operate. This huge additional cost considerably outweighs any possible service advantage and, more importantly, is well beyond what the ACT community can afford.
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