Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2324 ..

then minister, Mr Moore, he could only think of one or two occasions when the hospital previously went on bypass. Perhaps you could enlighten us, Mr Speaker, on how many times we had bypass when you were the health minister. So it is not normal; it is not acceptable; and it is not excusable.

It is often said, Mr Speaker, that the eyes of our hospital system are its emergency department. Well, the emergency department is very ill and the prognosis for the rest of the hospital system is not good. The cause of bypass, we are told, apart from busy days, is bed block. So what is bed block? Bed block is when the bed needed by someone admitted through the ED is occupied by someone else, say, someone recovering from surgery or, as is more usual, a nursing-home-type patient.

Mr Speaker, at any one time, 20 to 30 beds in our two public hospitals are occupied by nursing-home-type patients, and they shouldn’t be there. They shouldn’t be there, for a number of reasons: one, the care regime is different and inappropriate; and, two, it is far more expensive, something like $950 a day for an acute bed versus $150 a day or thereabouts for someone who should be more suitably placed into a nursing home. They should be somewhere else—a nursing home, a step-down facility, for example.

Plans for a step-down facility have been around for some time; indeed, I think they were first announced as early as 2001. But under this government, Mr Speaker, nothing has happened. As we found out in the estimates when we quizzed the minister on this, not only is the step-down facility that was due to be completed this year not going to be completed this year; it will not be completed until early 2006—almost five years after the concept was first mooted. And even now the, as it’s called, sub-non-acute facility, a project started by the previous government, has not gotten anywhere. After all this time the latest advice from the minister is that the plans are almost complete.

Mr Speaker, that facility itself will have doubled in cost and will not open until 2006. And I think that’s an optimistic goal, given this government’s glacial approach to projects. To give him some credit, there is now some money from the federal government involved—and it will be larger—but it still doesn’t excuse the glacial approach and the careless approach from this minister in not taking his responsibility seriously to deliver on his capital works. Mr Speaker, the point is that any relief to bed block that the sub-acute facility would offer is now not going to happen till 2006.

If they’re not going to go to the sub-acute facility, where else might they go? Well, they may have found a bed in a nursing home facility, if any had been approved or constructed by this government. I think it’s quite ironic that the man who runs the hospital system is the man who is causing it the most grief, the Minister for Planning, by not ensuring that approvals for aged-care facilities are processed quickly. And I don’t think anybody’s asking for any special favours here, Mr Speaker; it’s just that they’re taking years—in the case of the Calvary facility, almost three years—and that, in anybody’s language, is unacceptable.

Mr Speaker, it needs to be noted that not just the Canberra Hospital is involved in bypass. Calvary too has been on bypass approximately 15 times in the last 7 months. I must say that things have come to a pretty poor point when even the secondary hospital in the system has to bypass to your tertiary hospital. To give them credit, Calvary, I will grant you, has been coping somewhat better overall. For example, Calvary, for May at

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .