Page 591 - Week 02 - Thursday, 21 February 1991
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engaging in a major restructuring exercise to ensure that quality health care services are provided into the future on a sustainable basis. Naturally, with a restructuring of the kind that is going on, problems will arise because people need to be reorganised and because services have to be adjusted. That, of course, causes problems.
However, I have to say that I think the level of confidence in our system is still very high. Only today I have had relayed to me the comments of one person who came out of the hospital system in the last couple of days and who was full of praise for the quality of the system and of the people who work in it. I regret the fact that there are so many knockers of our public health system, particularly when it is bravely facing up to the problems that beset it through the kinds of measures being undertaken by this Government. I reject those kinds of attacks, and I think that those opposite should get down to the business of working with the Government to ensure an improved quality of health care in Canberra.
Ambulance Officers
MR WOOD: I direct a question to Mr Humphries, as Minister for Health. The article in the Canberra Times just referred to shows a very happy Mr Humphries next to the headline, "Conditions at ACT hospital described as Third-World". In that article the Minister is quoted as saying, "We would like to have more ambulance officers". Minister, why then have the seven extra Ambulance Service positions not been advertised?
MR HUMPHRIES: I have explained the situation in the past to Mr Berry and to others, but obviously people have not been listening. In terms of a comparison between numbers of staff when we took office and the number of staff now, we have recruited an additional seven ambulance officers; that is over the situation that we inherited.
Mr Berry: Only after I prodded you.
MR HUMPHRIES: You might take credit for that, but the fact is that we did it and you did not. We have, in addition to that, identified a process for establishing what additional requirements there are in the public health system for ambulance officers. That process arises out of the joint staffing strategy paper which was prepared by both the service and the responsible union, the Transport Workers Union. That process, I think, is a very good one. It certainly is being considered at the present time by the Board of Health, which is discussing implementation of that staffing paper with the union; and I have made a commitment already to the union and to this house that, as needs for additional staff emerge from that process, they will be met by the Government.
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