Page 2808 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 14 August 1990
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centred on a principal hospital; that is one way to go. It can be spread over several hospitals and facilities. Indeed, any able specialists worth their salt, whether there is a teaching hospital or not, would be involved in research. There are already doctors in this city, working in their own specialties, who are involved in research, writing papers and so forth.
Mr Berry: What happened to your support for having it at Royal Canberra? It has evaporated.
DR KINLOCH: Look, I am trying to speak to the subject of research and the potential for a university hospital. People can be rude and interrupt if they like. I remind them of standing order 61.
Some of the research of the kind which appears in a university medical school, a university hospital, is already here. We already have departments of physiology, biology, biochemistry and zoology in various tertiary institutions in this city; that is, we already have some of the areas which are essential for a teaching hospital. We do not have to begin from scratch. Not only is there the John Curtin medical school but there are also specialists in their own areas, who are not necessarily medical practitioners or medically trained, who have the needed technical specialist skills in a number of academic areas.
Much of that we already have and we would necessarily build on that. Mr Berry raises worries about the numbers of professors and so forth. One report I saw referred to a need for something like five additional professors for this institution. I do not think that is an extravagant claim.
So we can build on existing institutions. Some of those institutions may not easily occur to you. For example, there is already a special area of physiological research in the Institute of Sport. So across the city - in the CSIRO, the ANU, the University of Canberra, the Institute of Sport, ADFA and so forth - there are the beginnings of a number of areas of research.
There is also the possibility of specific research in specific research institutes. There is one area in the ANU already which deals with the problems of ageing and in particular with the problem of Alzheimer's disease. That kind of research is already going on and that is not necessarily related to the John Curtin medical school. There are individual research institutes already in existence.
So there is a very great need for us, as a Legislative Assembly, to initiate and foster in any way we can - and I would certainly like to be involved with this - a pulling together of the tremendous resources in this city, which need to be added to with the new professorships; the actual establishment of those fourth, fifth and sixth years at the ANU; and the growth of technical medical education at the
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