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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2335 ..

While we are talking about hospitals in the ACT, I will point out that the committee did express various concerns about several issues raised regarding treatment offered at Calvary Public Hospital, namely, the alleged refusal to perform tubal ligation, the inability of the emergency department to dispense emergency contraception and the general feeling amongst staff that they are unable to promote family planning methods. We did raise these issues with Calvary Hospital, and the response from Calvary stated that Calvary’s policies and procedures reflect the code of ethical standards for Catholic health and aged-care services. Copies of brochures given to post-natal women were also provided to the committee. We were concerned at the response from Calvary Health Care, as it was clear that patients seeking public services were having a particular religious ethos imposed on them, both through services provided or not provided, as the case may be, and the omission of balanced information on contraceptive care.

One other point I would raise in this MPI is the question of nurses. There are many other factors affecting the operation of a public hospital. Nurses are obviously important in this conversation, as is the current industrial tension in the context of an EBA. It seems one can sense an ACT election on the horizon when the nurses EBA is up for negotiation. My office enjoyed a few calls today from nurses who are particularly upset with the letter from the minister that they reported as an ultimatum. “Accept the EBA by the end of this week or forfeit your back-pay that would’ve accrued since April.” I’m not sure if they are exactly the details.

The nurses appear to be meeting at present to determine their response, but those nurses who rang my office were particularly incensed that the EBA process had not been concluded and that the offer was substantial in regards to nurses at the top of the range, around 23 per cent, but only half of that for those at the other end. It was put to us that the real shortage is at the entry level and that this offer is both inadequate and, given the ultimatum, unfair. I understand they’re talking about industrial action now.

There are real issues across our society when it comes to valuing and holding onto people who work in human services: the status of nurses, carers, disability workers, community sector workers and teachers is not rising but is falling; the consequences for the kind of society that we have, particularly when you consider the impact on individuals who cannot afford private health and education, their own personal carers and so on. The solution is both local, providing support for locally-based and community-based services, and national, with a real attempt to resolve the issues thrown up by the Commonwealth-state model.

MS MacDONALD (4.55): I rise to reaffirm Mr Corbell’s comments about the ACT public hospital system. The people of the ACT can be proud of the level of care and the quality of services provided by our hospitals. ACT Labor accepts that there is still work that needs to be done but we’re doing something about it.

On achieving office, ACT Labor had to immediately inject almost $9 million into the hospital system just to keep it going. In our first budget, we provided almost $12 million to increase the salaries of our health professionals who were poorly neglected under the previous government. We restructured the health portfolio so that it could plan and implement services in a strategic manner that met the needs of the entire community.

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