Page 2666 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 1991
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also serve an important teaching and training role in emergency care, general medicine and general surgery. Ultimately, at least one academic university department could be based at Calvary.
Let me say more on this Sydney University connection. I understand that Sydney University medical school may wish to be involved in and make a contribution to the ACT hospital system. That involvement may be timely if there is to be a revamping of the medical school from three clinical schools - namely, Royal North Shore, Nepean-Westmead, Royal Prince Alfred-Concord - to include one in Canberra dedicated to community medicine. The University of Sydney is so serious about this matter that a top team of six professors from their professorial board travelled from Sydney last week to speak with Mr Berry.
The Rally also believes that the Acton Peninsula should be retained as a health facility in a larger sense than we have heard today and should, as funds permit, become the health headquarters for the ACT and a centre for health promoting community activity, including that convalescent hospital. It could be the headquarters of an ACT-wide department of general practice and primary health care, in conjunction with the GPs, which could have outreach units within each of the teaching hospitals and an outreach both into private general practice and into the community health centres.
Ambulatory - that is, non-bed - geriatric and rehabilitation services could be transferred from Woden to Acton. Is it too late for this? This would make space available at Woden for early development of a general practice teaching presence in the new principal hospital and space for development of teaching staff from the University of Sydney. I hope that this will be taken on board.
The Queen Elizabeth II home for mothers and babies could be transferred from the city to Acton and housed in the ground floor of the obstetric block, if it is not possible for it to be incorporated in a new building on its present site. The present H block - and I want to be sure that the hospice happens as soon as possible - could be redesignated not only as a hospice but also as the headquarters for palliative care services. It could and should be the meeting point for general practitioners, community nurses and specialists in the management of patients who are terminally ill. There would be outreach from the palliative care service both into Woden and Calvary and into the community. This level of centralisation would not and must not detract from the delivery of suburban community health services.
Available vacant accommodation at Acton should be used in ways which reflect the functional development of a health centre in its broadest sense. Here again, we need that convalescent hospital. Activities which promote the health of the community should be housed there. You are also
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