Page 3636 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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feel on with casemix funding. Casemix accounting techniques will give us a better feel for that. It will not save us $30m. Again, I smiled at the hospital and said, "Casemix, casemix"; but it still did not create any more beds, and it still did not give me a $30m saving.
Madam Speaker, the ACT health system is, year after year, doing more with less in the sense of bed numbers. We are being more efficient. Our throughput is increasing. This year we are looking at about 50,000 admissions. We are dealing with about another 50,000 people in the emergency departments. It is a massive throughput in a town of some 300,000, although we have a region around us. We do have fewer beds now than we had some years ago. Mrs Carnell was getting terribly excited about that. She has made all sorts of nonsense allegations out and about.
Perhaps I should wait for the next Liberal question before dealing with that; but I would point out that, while they love to say that things are dreadful in the ACT, all members no doubt would have received the Canberra Doctor for this month, which has an interesting article on 10 years of health in Australia and which refers to public hospital beds in Australia from 1983 to 1992. It shows that there has been a decrease of about 25 to 26 per cent across Australia in public hospital beds in that 10-year period. For the equivalent period in the ACT the decrease has been 15.7 per cent. So, shock, horror; things are awful here! Interestingly, and Mrs Carnell no doubt would derive great joy from this, the private beds in the equivalent period in the ACT have increased by some 400 per cent, which is perhaps a little odd; but there we are. The total number of public and private beds in the ACT has increased, Madam Speaker. In June 1983 it was 980. It is now 1,007. So, the "Shock, horror; things are terrible" line of Mrs Carnell's is nonsense. All we ever hear from Mrs Carnell is carp and criticism. She is now thinking that she is onto a great political win with, "Gee, we are one point worse off than we should be on this month's running sheet, two months into the financial year. We'll all be rooned". All she does about health is to smile at the hospital, rip $30m off and chant casemix. It will not work.
MRS CARNELL: I have a supplementary question. After listening to that very long non-answer, I ask: Is the Minister aware of a preliminary projection carried out by Woden Valley Hospital management at the end of August that warns that the budget blow-out is not $371,000 for the whole year, but $4.6m for the whole year? Are you worried?
MR CONNOLLY: No, you dill. Of course, if you have a $300,000 blow-out in two months and you project that out and you do nothing, you will have a problem. The reason why we have put so much effort in, over the period of Mr Berry's administration and over the period I have been in charge of health, in getting a finer handle on what is happening financially is that we recall that under the Alliance you did not have a clue what was happening in health until the end of the financial year - Mr $17m, or whatever it was. I notice that Mr Humphries now has the good grace not to be present while we are talking about hospital blow-outs. I must say that that is a wise course of action because he is not the man to talk about them.
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