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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2332 ..

it’s an absolute emergency, until next year. I suppose I’ve got a little bit of current experience with orthopaedics—and I take my hat off to the orthopaedic surgeons in this town because they are working under extreme circumstances; I’ve had hugely good service from the orthopaedic department in my own case of a family member who had broken an arm—but I have great concern that on a Saturday morning my daughter was re-admitted to have her arm reset, came in at 7 o’clock and wasn’t done till 1.00 pm. That’s just the way things go.

Earlier in the day, I was told, “You can’t go home, Mrs Dunne, until the doctor has seen you.” At 7 o’clock that night I thought, “I’ll ask to see whether he’s inadvertently gone home and forgotten to see me before he went home. “No, Mrs Dunne, I’m sorry; he’s still in surgery.” He came to see me at 9.30 that night. He spent 5 minutes with me and 5 minutes with the lady and the child in the next bed. He sent me home with my daughter, and he went back into surgery. He had been operating from 7 o’clock on a Saturday morning. This is because there aren’t enough orthopaedic surgeons in this town. That’s why we’ve got 100 per cent overdue at Calvary Hospital; it’s why you can’t get a hip replacement in this town unless you are absolutely and utterly in extremes.

This is the public hospital system that Mr Corbell is lording over and saying that we have the finest public hospital system in Australia. If it’s the finest public hospital system, Mr Speaker, it’s just not good enough and it’s time that Mr Corbell did better for the people who elected him, for the people who pay him a high salary, and it’s time that he stopped dissembling and actually admitted that things are wrong, took people into his confidence and started to fix the problem.

MS DUNDAS (4.42): I would like to focus this debate, where we are talking about the issue of public hospitals and the public hospital system in the ACT, specifically on Calvary Hospital. Calvary Hospital provides both public and private services to the north side of Canberra as well as Canberra and the region more generally; it plays a teaching role—a role as a teaching hospital for the ANU and the University of Canberra—and it has the vital role of the delivery of network health services in the territory.

Mrs Dunne has already raised some issues in relation to how surgery has not been able to be performed at Calvary, but I’d like to raise concerns. I guess there are concerns coming through that resources and funding for Calvary are actually being overlooked or ignored in favour of the Canberra Hospital. This is of quite concern, because we do have two hospitals currently operating in the ACT, and they both need to be resourced to deliver services for the population of the ACT. We can’t start valuing one public hospital over another public hospital. I do think that this is going to become the attitude of this government. Calvary is not a competitor with Canberra Hospital but a complementer. It spreads the public health net to the ever-growing northern suburbs and, for the last 25 years, has provided distinguished service in terms of health care.

In the budget consultation period—I understand, from what they have told me—Calvary understood that their 25-year-old intensive care unit would be upgraded but they found when the budget was actually released that that money had disappeared. I think it says a lot about this government’s commitment to health, when we are talking about the funding for a small number of extra beds at Canberra Hospital, that we are not actually funding the refurbishment of a larger number of beds on the north side. The intensive

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