Page 5127 - Week 17 - Wednesday, 12 December 1990
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Of course, there have to be suitable constraints on those powers. Employment will be under the Public Service Act, with all its safeguards, and the Audit Act will guide the board's financial operations. Under these new arrangements, health services will be managed in a businesslike manner and operate as a separate authority at arm's length from the day-to-day administrative affairs of the Assembly and the Government.
In my presentation speech, I outlined the main objectives of the board. Those are broad in scope. They encompass efficient resource use; ensuring accessible and equitable provision of high quality health services; and a responsibility to focus on achieving safe environments and to provide information about health matters. Those are pretty broad and, I think, pretty acceptable. Most importantly, the ACT Board of Health will have overriding responsibility to promote, protect and improve the health of the residents of the ACT.
This means that the board is being required to focus not only on people being treated at any one moment in time but also, in a sense, on preventing service use by promoting and protecting the health of people in the first place. I will remind those opposite that this is one of the major achievements of a structure which integrates services which might be called preventative, such as are provided on a local suburban basis, with those services which are provided in a centralised and highly technical facility such as a hospital. There are major benefits, and I am sure that they will flow through quickly to the people of Canberra. The Board of Health as a separate entity is not a resource driven exercise. It is about achieving a more effective and efficient health service and, through that, an improved quality of life for residents of the ACT.
In the main, the Board of Health will be broadly modelled along the lines of the New South Wales area health boards. I might say that the model has been tried and tested. It was introduced, I think, by the Wran Government, maybe the Unsworth Government, certainly the New South Wales Labor Government in October 1986. It is being considered for introduction in Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. The concept has worked extremely well in New South Wales, and it is appropriate for us to pick it up.
It is also appropriate to bear in mind that health board area in New South Wales are approximately the size of the ACT in terms of population base. The concept recognises the essential need to integrate care and the protection of health across the complete range of health services. There is one difference from the model that we have inherited from New South Wales, in that it recognises that, since there will be only one health board in the ACT, it must include the important functions of State-wide services, policy and planning. In this respect it will work closely with the Ministry for Health, Education and the Arts and the Board of Management of Calvary Hospital and other agencies.
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