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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2239 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

He was diagnosed with that knee injury in 1996. That is a fair while ago. He could not afford to pay for private treatment. He was placed on the public waiting list in April of that year, 1996, and he has waited ever since. Until June this year, his only contact with the hospital was an annual review form. He has a wife and two young children. Because of the injury, he had to give up his work as a linesman, where he had solid possibilities of promotion, for an office job for which he had no previous experience. The injury to his knee affects his back, he cannot play sport and there is consistent pain in that knee. What kind of public health system can treat a person like that?

MR MOORE: The question is: what kind of public health system can treat a person like that? That gives me an opportunity to talk about what kind of public health system we have after I have responded specifically to that question.

Mr Wood, this sort of approach has been a matter of concern for me from the time I became minister, so I have taken a series of actions. First of all, I have worked very hard to ensure that our hospital waiting lists and waiting times have come down. You have heard about that any number of times. More importantly in this case, before any other minister had done so that I am aware of, I started publishing with the GPs a list of medical practitioners and the number of people on their waiting lists. As members will recall, I also sent copies to each member of this place.

Why did I do that? It is because there are some doctors with very long waiting lists and it may well be that this public patient-by the way, I do not know the particular name-is on the waiting list of one of the very popular orthopaedic surgeons who have very long waiting lists. Had he gone back to his GP and said, "I'd be happy for my knee to be done by somebody else," then he would have had it done more quickly, or had the orthopaedic surgeons taken the same approach as the gynaecologists have just taken, which I announced yesterday, of saying that they will share their lists.

Why have they said that they will share their lists? The reason is to solve this very problem, to make sure that some people do not get a particular advantage because they are going to a new orthopaedic surgeon or a new gynaecologist. What happens instead is that people are dealt with in priority order and we do not wind up with these unacceptable circumstances.

What kind of public hospital system would have this kind of approach? If you were to believe what Mr Stanhope said this morning on radio, you would believe that we have a health system or a hospital-I think he said a hospital-in crisis. Of course, that is patently false. Let me explain why.

Mr Stanhope: I said that we had a hopeless health minister.

MR MOORE: I will also illustrate why that is patently false, too. The person he refers to as a hopeless health minister is one who has been bringing down waiting lists, making sure that the hospital is improving and improving management, the very opposite of what happened when Mr Wayne Berry was the health minister; so do a comparison.

The Australian Council on Healthcare Standards has been through the process of accrediting the Canberra Hospital-the hospital that this man says is in crisis. What did it look at? Let us look at a couple of the areas where people would argue that you would

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