Page 3402 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 11 October 1994
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MR CONNOLLY: The advice I get - as I have said before and as I think I have tabled in this place - from the Royal Australian College of Paediatrics and the advice from prominent paediatricians in Canberra is that it would be bad medicine to duplicate paediatric services at Calvary, to try to produce another paediatric speciality unit at Calvary; that you should concentrate paediatric services in specialist, high intensity hospitals; you should have specialist units. That is what we have at Woden Valley Hospital, which is servicing this region. It would be bad to duplicate that.
Mr Humphries made the clear decision not to do that when the hospital redevelopment process occurred, because the decision was made to take the single unit that was at Royal Canberra Hospital and put it as a single unit at Woden, not to split it into two. The advice of all the experts, the advice of the paediatricians, is not to do it. The Calvary management, when they were interviewed on this, said, "No, we do not want it. We do not want to do this". Mrs Carnell is running a populist line. No doubt she would get lots of people to sign petitions saying, "Yes, we would like a paediatric unit at Calvary Hospital".
Mrs Carnell: Who cares what the people think?
MR CONNOLLY: "Who cares what the people think?", says Mrs Carnell - again cheap and populist. It would be easy for me to go out and hawk about for votes by saying, "Yes, we will duplicate a service". But we act on the advice of the College of Paediatrics, who say, "Do not do it". We act on the advice of the prominent paediatricians in Canberra, who say, "Do not do it". I table all of that.
Did I mislead the Assembly? No, Mr Kaine, I did not. There are two specialist paediatric hospitals in Sydney; there is one specialist paediatric hospital in Canberra; there may be beds that call themselves paediatric beds in other hospitals, but they are very much holding beds as you move people across. I did not say that there are paediatric beds in only two hospitals in Sydney. I was referring to specialist units. The consistent advice to the Government from the doctors whom we tend to respect as experts in their profession is, "Do not do it. Do not duplicate".
MR KAINE: I have a supplementary question, Madam Speaker. In the same answer to the same dorothy dixer the Minister said:
What we have at Woden is excellent. The facility at Woden hospital has a capacity of 60 general medical, surgical and isolation beds.
Minister, the paediatrics unit at Woden has 49 available beds, not 60. Why did you seek to misrepresent the matter to the Assembly by implying that there were 60 beds available on a regular basis, when there were not?
MADAM SPEAKER: Mr Kaine, be seated. That question is out of order.
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