Page 1638 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 18 May 1994
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experience when we were having our first child at Woden Valley Hospital. That was at the high point of construction, when to get from the maternity ward to anywhere else you had to go down temporary corridors that were erected to stop large blocks of concrete from falling on your head. The whole place had the feel of a construction site. It was an extraordinarily difficult environment. I commend the professionalism of the staff at Woden Valley Hospital - the nursing staff, the medical staff, and the support staff who make it all fit together. To go through the process of accreditation not in a calm, ideal environment but in an environment where they were still going flat out on construction work is a significant achievement, and they are to be commended for that.
I must say that I was pleased that Mr De Domenico was prepared to get up in this place last night and say that accident and emergency provided an excellent service. It is very easy to criticise A and E. Many people in the community still have the impression of A and E when it was down in the tunnel underneath the old main entrance. It had the feel of a 1960s facility. Many Canberra residents continue to be very pleasantly surprised when they have need to go to A and E - it is not the place that people would choose to visit, generally - and see what an absolute state-of-the-art facility it is and see the way discretion is exercised and genuine emergency cases get quick attention.
We will always get complaints about waiting times at A and E. Professor Gatenby made the point that at his hospital, at Prince Alfred in Sydney, people with minor ailments wait far longer than people here do. There is still a tendency in Canberra to assume that you go to A and E for quite minor ailments. People tend to think that treatment is given on a first come, first served basis; that it is a queue; that it is a waiting list. Perhaps we should have a better term than "waiting list". Waiting lists for surgery or for casualty are not waiting lists in the sense that you work your way through the queue in an orderly fashion. A discretion is exercised when a person presents. The emergency is seen first, and the person who has been waiting for four hours might have to wait for eight hours if people who have more urgent needs come in. I think we need to get an understanding of that in the community.
Mrs Carnell's extolling the virtues of the private system can lead to a skewing of the delivery of health care. This Government's concern, as is made clear in Mr Lamont's circulated amendment, is to provide a socially just outcome, a balance between an excellent and strong public system and - as we have at the moment in Canberra - an excellent and strong not-for-profit private system. I think that is an important distinction. The two private facilities in Canberra - Calvary and John James - both operate on a not-for-profit basis. Despite some of the rhetoric by the Liberals to the effect that there has been some conversion on the road to Damascus to the virtues of the private system, the Government views the private for-profit model very differently from the community based not-for-profit model that operates at John James and Calvary hospitals.
Mrs Carnell continues to say that she thinks we should have another hospital here; that we should have a Port Macquarie-style hospital. The Port Macquarie hospital happened, despite some real concerns of the residents of Port Macquarie, because the New South Wales Government made a decision not to do what we have done and invest massive capital in providing a first-rate public facility. So it was that or nothing. The Health Care Corporation of Australia thus saw an opportunity and have moved in. That situation does not prevail in the ACT. We have a public system that is being massively invested in and
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