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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (27 February) . . Page.. 333 ..

MRS CARNELL: Mr Moore, that rostering situation need never happen, as I think you would be aware. We have said categorically that we are very willing to discuss with each nurse, each person involved in the triple-eight roster, when they do their other shift, if they choose to. If you go from the 10 by 8 by 8 - with what used to be four nights on, four nights' worth of night duty, 10 by 4 - to the triple-eight, it could mean that a nurse may have to do another shift in order to achieve a full-time weekly wage. That other shift could be another night. It could be five nights. It could be at some other time. But it certainly does not have to be, by any stretch of the imagination, a shift that starts seven hours or five hours later. What is being said here is absolute emotional claptrap. The reality is that we are not in the business of forcing nurses to come back in a couple of hours if they believe that that will affect their professional capacity. There is nothing wrong with nurses doing five nights on duty, or, alternatively, another session which does not start seven hours or five hours after they have just finished.

MR MOORE: I have a supplementary question, Mr Speaker. I am aware that Mr Berry, when he was Minister for Health, also tried to implement the triple-eight roster and was convinced of how effective it would be. Mrs Carnell, in your answer to Mr Osborne's question you mentioned casual nurses. Do you categorise the work of casual nurses as less important than the work of nurses that you have working as full-time staff or part-time permanent staff?

MRS CARNELL: Casual nurses fill a lot of jobs in our hospital system. Many of them are agency nurses who come in just to fill a gap in our hospital system. Everybody who has ever worked in a ward would be aware that casual staff, although they are very important, are not the core patient care givers in any ward. I suppose the best possible scenario is to get to a stage where you never use casual staff - although that would be impossible in a hospital system - so that the staff that are in any ward are the ones who understand the patients who are there, are used to that ward situation, and do not need to be brought up to speed as quickly as agency nurses.

So, Mr Moore, the answer is that the best possible scenario is to use casual staff - that is not permanent part-timers, but casual staff - as little as is possible if you are looking at maximising patient care. That is the approach that we are attempting to take here. The move from 10 by 8 by 8 to triple-eight nursing rosters would save our health budget some $2m a year, and $2m a year could be used to treat a substantial number of the just under 4,500 patients waiting for surgery in the ACT. If those who so adamantly oppose the move from 10 by 8 by 8 to 8 by 8 by 8 can show me another way to move that money from an area where we are spending more than the national averages by miles down to treating patients - we are talking about $2m here, Mr Speaker - then please tell us. The situation is that we have to cut our costs at Woden Valley Hospital, in clerical areas, in nursing areas, the VMOs - all the way, across the board. Everybody has to take responsibility for that, including everyone in this house.

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