Page 872 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 27 March 1990
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The steering committee report on public hospital redevelopment emphasised the need to act quickly to commence work on the redevelopment program to ensure that people in Canberra and surrounding regions have access to improved quality services at the earliest possible time.
The Government agrees with the committee's view, Mr Speaker. By quickly expanding Calvary to its full capacity and fast tracking planning and design for new facilities, we will attempt to complete this massive program of upgrading and improving our public hospitals in the shortest possible time frame.
Mr Speaker, this program of upgrading and redevelopment is the most significant in the history of Canberra's health system. It will lead to major improvements in both quality and efficiency. The ACT hospital system has been neglected by the Commonwealth and, accordingly, needs significant upgrading. We will face this challenge and deliver outcomes which are manageable in the overall budget context and which maximise the quality and value of hospital services for the people of the ACT.
Mr Speaker, I want to turn to a second important initiative the Government has decided on and which I will announce today. The Health Services Supply Centre at Mitchell is currently run by the interim Hospitals Board. It provides a linen service, mainly a laundry operation, sterile supply, incineration, transport, works and engineering services for the ACT public hospitals and the Department of Health. The centre occupies a 9.1 hectare site at Mitchell on prime industrial land valued at $1.2m. The complex was constructed in the mid-1970s and is probably the best of its type in the whole of Australia. Plant and equipment valued at around $4.5m is also of a very high standard. The centre represents a total written down value of about $32m. Approximately 220 staff are employed by the Mitchell site.
Due to earlier population projections, which have proved to be overestimated, the centre was designed to service hospitals with a population twice the size of what we now expect for the ACT in the foreseeable future. This means that this very excellent ACT facility is grossly under-utilised and the community has not had the opportunity to derive the full benefits of its investment.
At present the centre is fully funded to provide services to the health portfolio. It only charges external clients and, therefore, its revenue of less than $1m per annum is very small compared with its annual operating cost of more than $13m per annum. Also the costs to the community of the services are higher than they need to be because of the inefficiencies resulting from under-utilisation and diseconomies of scale. The service can, however, be much more efficient and, consistent with the Alliance Government's principle that residents in Canberra should not pay more for ACT services than is paid elsewhere in Australia, we intend to rectify this situation.
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