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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (23 November) . . Page.. 2422 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

The approach that we took, knowing that we needed to spend proportionally more in the area of primary health care, early intervention medicine, was to address the problems in critical care. It has been tried before. Mr Connolly commissioned the Arthur Andersen report. There have been any number of reports into ACT Health and they have all come up with the same answer, and that is that we spend far too much money, our systems are not efficient, and we do not have a health system that is focused on patients. We have a health system that is focused on systems, not on patients; or on buildings, or on infrastructure, but certainly not on patients.

The approach that we took was to say, "Well, we cannot allow this to continue. We cannot allow the problems in mental health to continue. We cannot allow the problems right across the board in Health, such as the waiting list problems, to continue". Under the Labor Party the waiting list went up from 1,789, I think, to over 4,500. That cannot be allowed to continue. I imagine that the Labor Party would agree with that. The only approach that we could possibly take was to start addressing the problems in the critical care end, so we employed Booz Allen to look at exactly where the problems were.

Mr Connolly had gone half of the way. He got an overview of the problem. He got a report that said, "Yes, we are spending 30 per cent too much in our hospital system". That report said that there are now phases 2 and 3. Phase 2 was identifying exactly where that overspending was. We employed Booz Allen to do phase 2 of Mr Connolly's Andersen report and they have done that. They have shown us exactly where we can save some money to bring our services back to the sort of funding levels that we see in similar services around Australia.

Certainly, I do not want to be average. I do not want an average health system, but unfortunately the only money the Commonwealth gives us is to be average. Certainly, we can top that up a bit, but we do not have a capacity to top it up by much more than possibly 10 per cent. So we have to bring our costs down. I think everyone would agree with that. I cannot believe that anybody would not agree with that. I know that Mr Connolly, and even Mr Berry, attempted to do the same. They attempted to do the same but failed miserably, because the costs are still some 30 per cent above national averages.

The only way that we can spend more money on areas such as mental health is to address the hospital problems. We have now a process and proposals to achieve just that. We are attempting to work through those with the employees at the hospital. Certainly, nursing staff, who provide actual patient care, are absolutely fundamental to any health system; but what is not fundamental to health systems is roster overlaps, having far too many health professionals in administrative jobs, and having a system that is administratively top heavy.

The other thing that is not fundamental to health is to have buildings that are half empty and to spend health resources to keep them open. Regardless of what anyone in this house might think about Kippax or Melba, Melba is more than half empty. I would say it probably is about 80 per cent empty. Kippax is probably just under half empty. These are resources that health dollars are being spent on to keep them open. I do not know about

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