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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2291 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

seen at 8.00 pm, had been there for six hours, Mr Speaker. Chief Minister, your Government has stated its commitment to introducing customer service obligations in the ACT. When will you seek to implement this policy in the fracture clinic at Woden Valley Hospital so that patients can be given realistic appointment times and are not expected to wait for three, or in some cases six, hours for treatment?

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, this gives me an opportunity to talk about the change in culture at Woden Valley Hospital, to start focusing on patient care. I would totally agree with Mr Berry that a situation where patients are forced to wait for six hours, unnecessarily, is unacceptable. We are in the process of going through every part of the hospital, addressing just those problems - problems, of course, which we inherited. They are not new; but we are fixing them, and that makes it different. I believe that having a situation where people are forced to wait, unnecessarily, is not acceptable. I am sure that everyone on this side of the house would agree with that. The fracture clinic, though, does provide a very good service to the people of Canberra, as I am sure Mr Berry would acknowledge.

Mr Berry: I have never been to it.

MRS CARNELL: He does not accept that we have good staff. That is very interesting. But we do have some very good staff in the fracture clinic, and it is an issue of how we structure the appointments in the fracture clinic to ensure that we can get as many patients as possible through the system so that we are giving as many patients as possible the opportunity to use the fracture clinic at Woden Valley Hospital without, on the other side, keeping people waiting for too long. I will be very happy, when we come back to the Assembly in August, to give Mr Berry a full run-down on how the fracture clinic is working and what we are putting in place to overcome the problems.

MR SPEAKER: A supplementary question, Mr Berry?

MR BERRY: Leave aside, Mr Speaker, the $7.2m that has been lost in Health already - - -

MR SPEAKER: Supplementary, Mr Berry.

MR BERRY: And the loss of 50 beds and the loss of the cardio-thoracic unit - - -

MR SPEAKER: Supplementary.

MR BERRY: How can the Chief Minister possibly accept a hospital system that provides this level of service and at the same time move to put two extra expensive layers of administration and red tape into the hospital system and change the name of the hospital, at great expense to the community? How can she suffer a hospital system and spend that money?

MRS CARNELL: It is a very hypothetical question, Mr Speaker, and, I suspect that, apart from being out of order from a hypothetical perspective, it actually pre-empts debate; but I am still very happy to speak about - - -

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