Page 4112 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 24 November 1993
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an $8m or $9m budget blow-out, yes, it will all be the doctors' fault. That is what we are going to hear, Madam Speaker; mark my words. The evidence is here right now, only three days into the doctors strike, as Mr Berry puts it. The system is in serious trouble and any attempt to blame the doctors for a budget blow-out is simply reconstructing the facts in the style of Stalin to make what you want to be the case to actually be the case.
Madam Speaker, as I said, I think it was extremely unfortunate that Dr Bates was attacked in this place today and was accused of being personally responsible for having generated some of the problems Mr Berry referred to. I think Mr Berry should be ashamed of having dragged an individual in in that fashion, irrespective of what the net effect of some doctors' conduct might have been. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Dr Grahame Bates is personally responsible for any of that. Mr Berry well knows that Dr Bates has continued to work in the hospital system despite these recent problems, and that he is personally particularly concerned about the impact of these changes on patients. To suggest that he is personally responsible for some of these things is quite outrageous.
Mr Berry has pointed to only one indicator of success within his hospital system - that we are treating more people. He keeps parroting that. Just how good a test is it? The fact of life is, as the Chief Minister has told us in her budget papers, that we are experiencing a population increase in the ACT each year of 1.8 per cent. If we are experiencing 1.8 per cent more people in the ACT each year, we would have to be in a really serious situation if we were not treating more people, would we not? We would have to be in an absolute crisis if we were not able to treat more people in those circumstances. The population base is growing, revenue from rates and other government taxes and charges - Capital Duplicators to one side - is growing, and it follows, Madam Speaker, that we should be increasing the throughput of the hospital system; but if you look at any other test - occupancy rates, throughput based on those occupancy rates, budget outcomes, waiting lists, bed numbers - on any of those tests, tests which Mr Berry thought were important a few months ago, this system and this Minister have failed badly.
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (4.45): Madam Speaker, nobody would deny that the public health system in the ACT has been going through a difficult time, a difficulty caused, first of all, by the massive reconstruction program which we have engaged in and which is now over halfway completed. There also has been a need to restructure to an extent, and, as Mr Berry has pointed out, that also has been a difficult issue. I think it is a tribute to everybody working in the public health system that, up to the point of the VMOs strike, it did manage particularly well.
Mr Berry tabled in the Assembly today the activity report for the most recent quarter. Members opposite have not bothered to look at it, of course; but it would tell them that, for example, the length of stay has decreased. It would tell them also that the Woden Valley Hospital has been awarded three-year accreditation by the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards. It would tell them that the elective surgery waiting list has shown a decrease in the percentage of people waiting for more than 12 months. It would show them also that, where there has been an increase in the waiting list, the majority of the increase is the result of new registrations - that is, people waiting less than a month.
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