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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4739 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

and staff to be able to staff those beds. I know there have been a couple of situations over the last couple of months when there was a will to open more beds, but when we checked casual nursing services and our own nursing services there simply was not the trained staff.

I am sure Mr Wood would agree that, rather than open intensive care beds with staff who might not have the necessary level of expertise in intensive care nursing, in those very irregular circumstances it is better to make sure that those patients go to an intensive care bed in Sydney. I have to say that the opposite happens as well. When intensive care beds are full in other hospitals we end up with intensive care patients coming into the ACT. There is a general approach in the region that that occurs, and, I think, very appropriately.

Intensive care beds are extraordinarily expensive beds to keep open, but they are essential for any critical care hospital system. I understand that an intensive care bed, a staffed bed, costs, from memory, between $1,000 and $1,500 a day. Mr Wood would be aware that you would not have intensive care beds not being used at that sort of a cost. You have to make sure you fund up to the level of regular use. If we go above that, we try to staff. If we cannot, or cannot get the proper staff, we send to Sydney, and they do the same as well, as do other hospitals in the region. That is about good management. Possibly Mr Wood is saying that we should have a lot of beds open that are not needed most of the time, just in case.

MR WOOD: I have a supplementary question. Mr Speaker, I am not sure whether the Chief Minister is saying there is a cost problem or there is a training problem. She started on one tack and finished on another. Chief Minister, to get back to your first point, what is deficient in the training regimes so that you do not have sufficient people to work in this unit? Can you assure Canberrans that the same problem will not occur when the cardio-thoracic unit is opened next year?

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, if Mr Wood had listened he would know that I did not say there was insufficient staff. I said that on very rare occasions there ends up being a situation where nurses are sick, on holidays or whatever, and we have a particularly high call on intensive care beds. There may end up being a situation, irregularly, where we simply cannot get the staff to look after an extended number of beds - more beds than we normally have in our system. Under those circumstances we will send a patient to the best care available outside the ACT, which would normally be Sydney.

With regard to cardio-thoracic surgery, we have had nurses in training for cardio-thoracic surgery since probably August, I think, but certainly over the last couple of months. I think we sent our first group of nurses down to St Vincent's for on-the-job training at about that time. I understand that other nurses have been trained subsequently. There are, as I understand it, sufficient well-trained nurses in the area.

Mr Speaker, in any hospital system there will always be times when staff get sick, when there is an abnormally high level of absenteeism and when there is an abnormally high level of patients. That goes without saying. Under the previous Government we regularly saw the air ambulance out at the airport taking patients out of the ACT.

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