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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2264 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Mr Speaker, the reason why I tabled these documents that you have before you is to demonstrate clearly to you that we have a hospital that is running extraordinarily well. Yes, there was a problem a couple of weeks ago because the hospital was under pressure, just the same as every other hospital in Australia comes under pressure sometimes. I have just tabled for you documents that show that in the intensive care unit area this intensive care unit is 10 times more successful than the Australian average in making sure they can take people when they are required to take people.

There is a whole series of these. I just use these as examples. The emergency area of the hospital, and every single category, is significantly better than equivalent hospitals in Australia. I am not talking about the range of hospitals, I am talking about equivalent hospitals. I am talking about hospitals with over 500 beds. I am talking about teaching hospitals. Mr Speaker, we have a fantastic hospital.

It is a good thing for Mr Berry to stand up there and say, "Look, I achieved all of these things." In respect of some of the things that he claims that he achieved, I agree; he did. I have always given him credit for bringing the smoke-free areas legislation into this Assembly. I sought, along with others, to modify it a little, and we may debate whether that was the best thing to do or not. I think it has allowed it, as I predicted it would, to go into pubs and clubs and also into restaurants, but that was at the fringe. Mr Berry did achieve that. Nobody can ever take that away from him, and it was a fantastic achievement because it led Australia in smoke-free areas. Mr Berry, I have to say, to your credit, that the AMA recently said that it is still the best legislation in Australia for smoke-free areas. It was through Mr Berry's efforts, my effort and the effort of the Assembly.

When the Royal Canberra Hospital and the Woden Valley Hospital were amalgamated, two different sets of nursing systems were put side by side instead of being integrated, and I think that started a cultural problem in that combined hospital. Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, we can look back and say what went wrong. I would have to argue that what went wrong there was that we missed an opportunity to start a brand new culture, to work carefully together to make sure that the nursing service understood where it was going, shared a vision of where it was going and established a brand new culture. It should have been obvious at the time that you could never do that by allowing some nurses to still identify themselves as Royal Canberra nurses and other nurses to identify themselves as Woden Valley Hospital nurses and put them in wards next to each other and so on.

That was an absolute disaster, Mr Berry, and that was one of your contributions that we are now trying to correct. The papers that are tabled before you will help you understand how we are trying to go about that. I think Mr Ted Rayment is being absolutely brilliant in going about the processes involved in changing the culture of the hospital.

I have to add one more thing on that. When I asked Mr Trevor Boucher to come onto the board and to help us bring about the change in culture in the hospital-that was approved by the Assembly-he said to me, "Michael, you have to understand that this is not going to happen instantly. Changing culture like this goes layer by layer and takes a long time. You have to understand that it is going to be maybe four or five years before you can implement that change in culture." Of course, my response was that we had better get

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