Page 3680 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 15 October 1991
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hospitals. They see hospitals as having taken over as the great central fact of health discussion. That has skew-whiffed, to use an old term, the nature of health care, and that is not where most health care is provided.
The other side of that coin is that there is an accompanying underconcentration on health care where people live in their communities. The feeling that one got from these very good people - they were not running some kind of political operation at all that evening; they were trying to express their worries - was that they had been sat on the side, on the periphery, with not sufficient support for them. They wanted to argue that they were a crucial element in an overall plan of health care, which of course includes the GPs. Most health care, frankly, takes place at the level of the general practitioner, the chemist's office, in the home and in community health care places.
Of course the hospitals are important. But there is this problem of where the emphasis should be put for the community health people and their association. They conclude that there is not only a lack of funding but also an inadequacy of staffing for nursing at the community workface. I would welcome other comments here, but I felt that they were low in self-esteem. I am not saying that they did not think they were doing a good job; I think they did think they were doing a good job. But they were overstressed and had this feeling that somehow the overall health professional body did not see the centrality of their work. So, one could conclude from that evening that there was an inadequacy of focus on health care in a range of areas of community nursing.
I would want to endorse, in general, the points that have been made, without picking out any particular agony story. In today's press there is one story that I think we should recognise. That was written by Virginia Davies, the convenor of the Post Natal Depression Support Group. She writes:
... I feel quite appalled by the cutbacks in community nursing -
she refers to a story -
... in daily contact with women suffering from post natal depression ...
I will not read the whole letter; it is in today's paper. But I would like to suggest again that there are individual areas of community nursing that badly need to be addressed.
MR JENSEN (4.01): Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the provision of community service nursing facilities throughout Canberra is very important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the ability of community health services to be provided to the people where they are needed, at what we generally call the coalface, in the suburbs.
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