Page 3675 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 20 October 1993
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HOUSEHOLDER SURVEY REPORT
Ministerial St
atement and Paper
Debate resumed from 19 October 1993, on motion by Ms Follett:
That the Assembly takes note of the papers.
MRS CARNELL (Leader of the Opposition) (3.41): Yesterday, in my speech on the householder survey, I got to the part on health, I think. On the subject of health services, this survey was very interesting, Mr Deputy Speaker. The survey said that 54 per cent of people who had used the public hospital service in Canberra over the last 12 months perceived that the service was either average or below average. I think it is actually even more interesting to have a look at the comparison of services that were received at Calvary Hospital and those received at Woden Valley Hospital. It was interesting that, in the case of patients who had been in for one day or more, 67.7 per cent of those who had been in Calvary believed that the service was of a high standard, whereas only 44 per cent believed the same at Woden. There was a 23 per cent gap for two hospitals, both public hospitals and both publicly funded. It was also interesting in that, for those people who had been in for more than one day and who believed that the service had been of a low standard, in Calvary it was only 9.4 per cent, while in Woden Valley it was 20.8 per cent - an 11 per cent difference. That is a quite dramatic difference.
When you look at the casualty services, or the people who used casualty and what they perceived about their service, at Calvary the figure for people who believed that it was of a high standard was 46.1 per cent; at Woden it was only 29.4 per cent - a 16.7 per cent difference. Again, in casualty, for those who believed that the standard of the service that they got in casualty was low, at Calvary it was 19.4 per cent and at Woden 36.1 per cent. I wonder, if this is a public consultation document, as the Chief Minister said it was, what she and her Health Minister, Mr Berry, have done about these figures. I would suggest that they are very disturbing figures, from the point of view of Woden Valley Hospital anyway. If you have a situation where 36.1 per cent - more than a third - of all people who go to casualty at Woden Valley believe that the service is of a low standard, I suggest that something should be done. But where in the budget, Mr Deputy Speaker, did we see either Ms Follett or Mr Berry address these awful results? They did not address them anywhere in the budget, or anywhere else since.
Mr Berry: Seventy per cent think it is good.
MRS CARNELL: Mr Berry, 70 per cent do not think it is good; 70 per cent think it is average or better. That is not good. If we have a situation, as I say again, where you have a huge difference in the public acceptance ratio between two hospitals in the same city on either side, you would want to ask lots of questions as to why this happened; but no, we have not seen any of that. That really shows how this Government treats public consultation.
It is all very well to put out forms where people can tick little boxes and you get the results back and they are pretty tables, but if you do not do anything with the information you get you may as well not have spent the money in the first place. Community consultation results have to be acted upon, or, at the very least, they have to be part of any decision making process, if that money is to be well spent. It would appear that the Government listens to only what it wants to hear.
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