Page 3028 - Week 10 - Thursday, 15 September 1994
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
That is simply not acceptable. In June 1991, there were 891 beds. In June 1992, there were 819 beds. Now the Health Minister himself says that that should be only 600 beds, and they are spending more.
Mr De Domenico: But there are people sleeping in the corridors.
MRS CARNELL: That is right. That is why.
In June this year, the Liberal Party outlined a three-year strategy to restore public confidence in Canberra's hospital system. The basis of our approach is to ensure that the system becomes patient focused. That is the reason why I support casemix funding for health. It is a method of funding hospitals which has been adopted in Victoria and South Australia and which is being promoted strongly by the Federal Labor Health Minister, Carmen Lawrence. The basis of casemix funding is that hospitals are paid for the patients they actually treat, not for merely existing. The hospital is paid a set amount of money for a particular procedure, depending on the age and general health status of the patient. So, if the hospital treats more patients - guess what? - it receives more money.
Mr De Domenico: So Carmen Lawrence believes in casemix?
MRS CARNELL: That is right.
Mr De Domenico: Which means that she has to get approval from caucus. And Mrs Kelly would have supported that as well.
MRS CARNELL: They all support it - everybody does, except this Government. This is an incentive to actually treat more people; to get people off the waiting list and into our hospitals. We have projected that, at the end of our three-year plan to introduce casemix, this system will actually save $26m by bringing the ACT into line with national benchmarks. It is fascinating to see Mr Connolly's own report, the Arthur Andersen report, which says in recommendation 23:
. establish an output-based Casemix funding approach for WVH and Calvary.
Then it says:
. implementation should be phased in over several years to enable refinement and transition.
That is like the three years that the Liberal Party put into their budget. On page 14 it says:
On the basis of this Casemix-based comparison, the total operating cost of WVH would need to be reduced by $32.9m in order to meet the national average.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .