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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (25 August) . . Page.. 1263 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

I have had advice that the hospital is oversupplied by about 80 nurses. That advice came through the report from the Auditor-General prepared by an associate professor of nursing, Deborah Piccone, who for eight years was head of the ANF in New South Wales. She looked at our hospital and said, "You are 80 nurses overstaffed". Then I have the local ANF saying we are 50 nurses understaffed. Remember that when you are talking about 50 nurses understaffed you are talking about roughly $3m.

That brings me to the point of what "Setting the Agenda" is about. If I had $3m, which I do not, to spend on health care, I would not be putting it into an extra 50 nurses. What "Setting the Agenda" says is that we know where we are going and we know what our focus is. Our focus is about primary health care. If we had $3m, it would be much more likely to go to areas such as allied health, aged care, respite care and so on, because we know that we would get much better health outcomes from that kind of expenditure. That is not to say, as Mr Stanhope correctly points out, that there are not strains on the hospital at that moment. There are clear strains on the hospital at the moment, but those strains, more than anything else, are about the VMO dispute.

Mr Berry: Cut it out, Michael. You cannot go on forever.

MR MOORE: As you know, Mr Speaker, Mr Berry has been interjecting through a large part of my speech. I will respond to this interjection. Remember the dispute, Mr Berry, that you had with the VMOs. That also put a huge amount of strain on the hospital system. Mr Berry, you may just remember that right through that dispute I was very supportive of you, in spite of the excessive strains it was putting on the hospital.

We will get through that, Mr Speaker. The activity report to be tabled in the next couple of days will indicate that even in spite of the strains of the doctors dispute and the normal strains of winter we are still delivering far more separations than was the case 12 months ago, and we have a much better performance in throughput and on a series of other measures than was the case when either Mr Berry or Mr Connolly was Health Minister. Yes, there is some strain on the hospital.

There will always be a strain on the hospital, but the first important thing is: Are we delivering waiting times that meet clinical necessity? Whether under Mr Berry or anybody else, all our hospitals have been successful in delivering emergency services when they are required. They have always done that. We should be very proud of the fact that they do that, because there are plenty of hospitals that do not.

The second important thing is: How is our hospital going in category 1 elective patients? In the vast majority of cases, patients are getting their treatment when they need it. When the doctor has said the clinical necessity is within 30 days, they are getting it. I believe that in the last month there were 39 exceptions to that. That is 39 too many, but we have explained what the issues are and we are attempting to deal with those.

People can always look for problems with this public hospital. There will be problems, because it is a major teaching hospital and occasionally that creates some problems. This hospital has been recently accredited. We are now the only jurisdiction in Australia where all public hospitals - both our public hospitals - are accredited.

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