Page 3659 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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What do we have? The Minister said that 14 of the 24 beds he promised would be open by 1 July were actually opened. We find that that is simply not the truth. That, in itself, is something that the Minister should worry quite a lot about, because it was not terribly hard to find out; it just took a few phone calls, Minister. What we have in the paediatric beds area, and that was one that the Minister picked up in his tabled documents, is a situation where certainly the advice the Minister got was right, to the extent that it says:
Since that time, a further 7 paediatric beds have opened ...
Unfortunately, the advice, that the Minister chose not to check, did not go on to say "and they have subsequently closed". I do not think that is acceptable advice. Personally, I do not believe the Minister - he has ministerial responsibility, and I suspect that he should have checked - if all he does is just accept the advice that he is given.
I will go on to talk about the total number of beds in the hospital system. One of the questions we asked on Tuesday was about the total number of beds in the system. I think the quote that we put to the Minister was that he did say that he wanted to get those beds reopened. He said:
We provided funding to have them reopened by 1 July. That would get us to 600. We currently have 584 beds.
Members would remember that the documents that I tabled suggested that there were 562 beds at the end of August. We have to look at the figures that the Minister used. He now admits that in those 584 beds were 10 dialysis chairs that had never been counted before. The 10 that were actually at Woden Valley Hospital certainly had been counted, but we have 10 dialysis chairs that are actually at the old Canberra hospital.
Mr Connolly: You said to the media that the 20 had never been counted. You counted the ones that were there when you were on the Board of Health.
MRS CARNELL: You do not want to go into that. We will talk about that, too, if you like. The 10 dialysis chairs that are not at the hospital have never been counted before. But, interestingly, the Minister went on to admit, in these documents, that they counted 20 neonatal nursery beds. In the Minister's own statement in the house yesterday, he said that the major inaccuracies in the document tabled by me include the 20 neonatal nursery beds that were not included. He went on to say:
Cots are beds and have always been counted as such. You foolish little politician.
I am sure that the Minister now knows that neonatal nursery beds have not always been counted; in fact, they have never been counted, until now.
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