Page 408 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 13 May 1992
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However, let me start my response by raising the issue of establishing a cardio-thoracic unit in the ACT, which is a question relevant to World Health Day's heart theme. I do not think it is helpful for health outcomes and the quality of life to send patients suffering from heart problems interstate to obtain complicated surgery. I note that in Mr Berry's speech he indicated that the Government will be looking at the viability of a cardio-thoracic unit in the ACT. That statement represents a welcome departure from what he has previously said.
On 18 December last year he said, according to the Canberra Times, that we did not need a cardio-thoracic unit. As of yesterday, Mr Berry suggested that everything in the Canberra Times is obviously the truth and nothing but the truth. At exactly the same time he acknowledged that we currently have around 300 people travelling interstate to obtain heart surgery, and he drew a comparison between this figure and the levels of activity experienced by two teams working on bypass surgery at Westmead Hospital. Mr Berry said, and remember that this is all absolutely the truth:
300 people is a lot. But what you have to understand is that Westmead Hospital, for example, has two teams working on bypass surgery at any point and I think they do about six a week ... not the sort of through-put on my assessment that would be required in the ACT to establish such a unit.
Mr Berry's assessment is very strange. Whether he meant that each team did six per week or that this was the number performed by both the teams, I am sure you will agree that we have the sort of throughput, on Mr Berry's own figures, required to establish a cardio-thoracic unit in Canberra. Had Mr Berry done his arithmetic, he would have seen this: 300 people divided by 52 weeks in the year equals 5.76, which is very close to the six operations performed by each team at Westmead.
Surely this is a good case for establishing a team. Such a team would be treating 5.76 patients per week in Canberra compared to six a week at Westmead - and this is assuming that we attract absolutely no cases from surrounding districts. As we are very well aware, a large number of cases in the ACT come from surrounding districts. Hopefully, there will be more with the advent of the principal hospital. How Mr Berry can have admitted these two statistics in the same breath is beyond me. Perhaps the Health Minister has redone his sums and that is why he is showing some new interest in the need for a cardio-thoracic unit.
The Minister mentioned in his speech efforts to establish a clinical school. Having a cardio-thoracic unit would help make such a clinical school viable, because its success is dependent upon the types of activities that are taught and the variety of skills we will be encouraging our students to acquire. I acknowledge that the ACT has severe funding problems. Even after mustering the capital funding necessary to start such a project, we would still be pressed to find the recurrent funding necessary for its maintenance. It has to be a question of priorities. Surely money would be far better spent on a heart unit than on an abortion clinic, or even on an independent complaints unit when we already have a number of other complaints facilities in the ACT.
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