Page 1934 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 1992
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To sum up, there is plenty of space at Royal Canberra Hospital. You can reuse a floor at a time. Canberrans want that space kept for health services. We will need extra hospital facilities in the fairly near future, and it would make an ideal spot for a hospice, for convalescence and for nursing care. The big point is that that is what Canberrans want. There is no logical reason to go against the will of the people in this matter.
MRS CARNELL (4.11): I would like to use this opportunity to make some comment on the appropriateness of locating at least one of the proposed health facilities at Acton Peninsula, particularly after the comments of Mr Stevenson. There are longstanding proposals to build a new hospice facility and to develop palliative care into an integrated holistic service for Canberra. These proposals have been around for much longer than any talk of a publicly funded, freestanding abortion clinic, and once again I must focus on the need to get our priorities right. Proposals for a hospice have been around since 1980. Even before that there was an awareness that there was a need for one. Canberrans may, at last, be going to get their hospice, and not a moment too soon; but right at the time that the Labor Government seems to be getting around to funding the facility they seem to be getting the location all wrong.
Under a freedom of information request I received a wealth of information confirming the fact that the hospice would be much better located adjacent to one of the two major hospitals, either Woden Valley or Calvary. Every single inquiry that has looked at this has come out with the same approach. But the weight of opinion seems to be that locating the facility in the grounds of Calvary Hospital, possibly by refurbishing and extending residence C at the hospital, would be the preferred option. There are excellent reasons why the hospice facility should be located there and not on the Acton Peninsula.
Firstly, the Little Company of Mary has as part of its ethos the commitment to providing excellence in palliative care. This is one of the fundamental reasons for their existence - to provide this sort of excellence. They are more than qualified, therefore, to manage a hospice facility on behalf of the ACT. Another advantage of location within the grounds of Calvary Hospital is that a hospice could be established as part of an integrated system of palliative care. If you have the hospice as a stand-alone facility, isolated at Acton Peninsula, it will be substantially harder to develop such an integrated service. Despite the fact that development of an integrated palliative care service was announced in the 1991-92 budget, Mr Berry does not seem to have done much about this. In any event, there is a good opportunity to develop a hospice as part of an integrated palliative care service at Calvary Hospital. I urge Mr Berry to embrace this opportunity now.
I believe that the Government should keep the best interests of patients in mind when thinking about where to locate new health facilities and I believe that in some cases Acton Peninsula is not the appropriate location. With some other facilities already suggested for Acton, such as the convalescent unit, the new Queen Elizabeth home for mums and babies, the nursing home, disability services and rehabilitation services, I think we must focus on the need for
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