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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2339 ..

MRS DUNNE

That will mean at Calvary that, instead of the theatres closing for elective surgery for 12 weeks, as happened this financial year, next financial year they will be closed for seven. It is a measly increase in an area which has a huge impact on the health of all the people in Canberra. Most of the orthopaedic surgery in Canberra is done at Calvary Hospital, but there is a huge impact on the health care provided to the people of Belconnen and Gungahlin in particular if there is no throughput because there is no scope for beds and other services are held up as a result of that.

The parents and the children in my electorate are being let down by this health minister because there are not enough resources going into Calvary Hospital to provide for their basic needs. People who need to have surgery in a short period are now having to wait double the time they used to wait in February 2002.

That is a symptom of everything that you see with this government. There is more money going in. Almost every time we have had an appropriation bill in this place or a supplementary appropriation bill since we have been here, there has been more money for the hospital. In the first supplementary appropriation bill after the government came to power, there was money there that urgently had to go into the hospital. Extra money eventually dribbled into the hospital, but we are not seeing extra services. We are paying more and more and getting progressively less out of the hospital. That is not what the people of the ACT need and it is not what they demand, and this government will pay a high price for that because the services that are being provided, basic services, are going down the gurgler.

There are a whole range of other things in this budget that, from time to time, we have seen members commenting on-things which look like initiatives but which, when you dig deep, are not really initiatives. Take the growth in the cost of pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals are pharmaceuticals; they are things that you have to buy every year and provide to people in hospital. The spending of another $250,000 this year is not an initiative and is not a new idea; it is just something that the government has to do. The same applies to the cost of surgical implants.

I do have to pay credit to the hospital because they have looked very closely at how they can better manage their costs and they are trying to do good things and make sure that there aren't massive costs overruns in areas like pharmaceuticals and surgical implants, but in other places there seem to be massive cost overruns where there is no control over the spending.

The government has a range of initiatives across the community for additional registrars, which is a good thing, a very good thing, but there is still a long way to go because they are still not addressing adequately-I reinforce that; they are still not addressing adequately-the unconscionable hours that registrars and young doctors work in hospitals.

They put their own careers and their own health on the line and, when they are working long shifts and back-to-back shifts, they are putting the health of their patients on the line. The practices that have occurred in hospitals across this country and across the world for years and years must be brought to a halt.

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