Page 688 - Week 02 - Thursday, 21 February 1991
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MR HUMPHRIES: We usually do, yes, but not always. The letter is to the editor of the Canberra Times and reads as follows:
Dear Sir
I found your sensationalist headline re Third-World Hospital in the ACT ... not only inaccurate but insulting to all the health care providers working in ACT hospitals. It wasn't clear whether your unnamed and so called senior hospital source meant to insult Royal Canberra North or Calvary Hospital. The examples given however showed that all the patients involved appeared to have in fact received adequate care. The reality of strokes is that modern medicine is essentially supportive. The body "heals" the damage. Hospitals essentially only offer supportive therapy. Is the implication that Calvary hospital is incapable of this? A short trip in an ambulance for any interhospital transfer has frequently occurred in the ACT for years. In a stable stroke patient this is unlikely to lead to any detriment to the patient. As for the case of lung cancer, as is obvious to the public at large this is a disease of very poor outlook. Cancer does not occur overnight and thus a delay of a week or so, particularly in a condition where in the vast majority of cases surgery has no or little long term benefit is hardly a catastrophe.
I think your newspaper and the media generally should be condemned when they use such misleading headlines. It needlessly destroys the population's confidence in the health system merely so you can grab attention, sell more newspapers or for the selfish aims of misguided and self interested "unnamed sources".
The ACT has never had a hospital system (despite the sums of money spent on it) that matches the level of care obtained in the other major Australian capital cities. Over the next few years - - -
Mr Connolly: There were much shorter waiting lists under Labor.
MR HUMPHRIES: Listen to this, Mr Connolly:
Over the next few years the Hospitals Redevelopment is the only chance the ACT has of obtaining the equivalent level of care that is already obtainable in all our other capital cities. If selfish, narrow minded groups prevail and trick your editorial staff to produce such
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