Page 273 - Week 01 - Thursday, 24 February 1994
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impact that that will have on the already overstretched health budget. I am going to make him eat his words, particularly those words that he told ABC radio last August - and I still cannot believe them. He said:
We're on the way to a better health system.
He said that on a number of occasions.
Mr Berry: And we are.
MRS CARNELL: A better health system with no beds, everybody on the waiting list - an amazing health system! Firstly, let me present the Minister with the facts, because his office had an awful lot of trouble yesterday advising the Minister what the true picture was when it comes to ACT Health and the budget. Mr Berry, there are 3,688 people on our hospital waiting list. This waiting list has more than doubled - that is, increased by 106 per cent - since you took office in mid-1991. One in every three patients on this waiting list has to wait for more than six months for elective surgery.
We have the lowest number of public hospital beds per capita of any State or Territory in Australia. In fact, we had the lowest number of public hospital beds before we closed the 128 beds that have been closed in the last 12 months. Now we have a level of public hospital beds that is lower than the projections that the Macklin report made of the need in Australia in the year 2000 after taking into account the growth in day surgery. With Mr Berry's much spoken about day surgery, the Macklin report suggested that we would need fewer beds, but now the ACT is dramatically below the 3.3 beds per 1,000 that the Macklin report suggests we will need in the year 2000. In fact, the ACT is quite a lot below, at 2.5 beds per 1,000, which really shows you that we are below the critical level. As I mentioned in question time, there are reports that we have only 482 beds open at Woden Valley Hospital today. Last week there were all sorts of reports in the Canberra Times about how we had a 10 per cent reduction to 556 beds. Now we find that only 482 beds are actually available today. This has to be one of the best new comments on health: We do not actually close beds any more in ACT Health; we make them "unavailable", which apparently is something totally different.
Mr De Domenico: Who said that?
MRS CARNELL: It seems that the chief executive of Woden Valley Hospital suggested that the beds were only unavailable; they were not closed. It is certainly an unusual approach. Remember that, on average, we had 610 beds open at Woden Valley Hospital last year.
Mr Berry: Get your figures right.
MRS CARNELL: That was your figure, Mr Berry. Are your reports wrong? We had 610 beds last year, and it seems, from counting the beds today, that we have 482 now. That means that one in five beds have been shut down over a period possibly as short as two months. In June 1991, when Mr Berry came to office as Minister, the average number of public hospital beds in the ACT was 891. Today we have 658 beds. That is 233 fewer beds.
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