Page 3127 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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Another is the structure of community nursing, and nursing more generally - a matter that has been in the Industrial Relations Commission even today, I understand. Another question is the distribution of health centres in the Territory, deciding how we provide health centres and what the nature of the service in those centres should be. How do we justify the fact that some areas of Canberra have something like three or four times the number of health centres per head of population that other areas have? How do we shape and adapt the ongoing role of women's health services in Canberra? For example, should the ACT take up, and, if so, in what form, the national breast cancer screening project? Finally, a very important issue, I believe, and one which will simply not go away, is whether the ACT is to proceed with a school of clinical medicine, whether we are to go down the path of providing for educating doctors in the Territory.
Obviously, Mr Speaker, the future of health services generally is going to be characterised most predominantly by the question of cost. How do we balance on the one hand the rising cost of health services against tightening revenues? We have to accept that each service provided in our hospitals will probably tend to get more expensive rather than less expensive. As medicine finds newer and better ways of dealing with illness, we face additional costs, and in the present atmosphere of a recession it will be very difficult to contain those costs and to encourage people to ensure that they make some provision of their own towards the cost of those services. Naturally, Mr Speaker, that will represent an ongoing balancing act which governments will have to be extremely adept at handling.
Mr Speaker, I want to say something about the people who served both me and my predecessor and my successor in health. Those people, the senior officers in particular - I do not exclude others in the health services, but I am talking particularly about the senior officers in health - have done, I believe, in the last couple of years, a tremendous job in managing a process of tremendous change. I would not hesitate to describe the job of restructuring health services with the hospital redevelopment in this Territory as a mammoth task, a task requiring tremendous talent and energy, and it has been provided unfailingly by those in the senior levels of our health administration. I believe that those people, despite frequent denigration, deserve to be acknowledged for their tremendous dedication to that basic task of improving the quality of health services in this city.
I believe, Mr Speaker, that we have a bright future because we start from a better position than most of the States, but it will not be achieved unless we face squarely the problems that our Territory has inherited and look to the future of health services by consolidating and managing better and more cheaply the services that we have inherited.
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