Page 2665 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 1991
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wherever the hospice could be. We accept that at last Mr Berry has reversed his views and agreed that there will be a hospice eventually. Let us at least thank him for that. Let us hope that the plans are under way this week, and that the building begins not at some remote time in 1992 but as soon as possible in 1992. I will come to that in due course.
The entire ACT public health care system should be seen as an integrated whole in which various components complement rather than compete with each other. Mostly, what we have heard about is hospitals. Hospital care must be seen on a continuum with community and preventive care and not as an end in itself. To that end, there should be a new emphasis given to general practice and primary health care, with an increasing role for local GPs.
There is another area altogether apart from that but which relates to that. Originally there was considerable involvement of general practitioners in day-to-day health care services within hospitals. With time, these services have been whittled away and general practitioners pushed aside. The outcome of this separation is that hospitals have become divorced from community health care, with resultant costs and inefficiencies associated with poor communication and uncoordinated patient care. I was grateful to Mr Berry for turning up and giving a good talk at a meeting of the Community Health Association. I wish he could have remained throughout that meeting to hear the great concern about this matter. A well coordinated program involving GPs in preadmission examination could produce very substantial cost savings through reduced readmission, earlier discharge and much reduced family disruption and patient morbidity.
I come now to an area that I know Mr Berry is considering, but it does not appear anywhere in his statement. The principal hospital development should proceed at the Woden Valley Hospital, as previously planned, but without being blindly fast-tracked, with a divisional structure but as part of, I stress, a high quality specialist teaching hospital. The current proposals for a clinical school to be developed in association with the University of Sydney medical school should now be vigorously pursued. A decision should be made to implement it, if at all possible, so that the reorganisation of the principal hospital can take advantage of a university infrastructure from the very beginning. I am anxious to hear Mr Berry's views on this.
This would provide the best possible guarantee that care of the highest quality could be available throughout the ACT health system, which presently, and with present planning, lacks the stimulation and enrichment of a scholarly and teaching component in its structure. We need that clinical school. Of course, Calvary should continue to be redeveloped as a high quality community hospital which will
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