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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Wednesday, 23 June 2004) . . Page.. 2475 ..

unit which should be sorted out, RILU should be more than maintained if the need is there. If the capacity is weakened, then there should be serious attention paid to that.

MR HARGREAVES (11.37): I will not be very long. Ms Tucker has decided to leave the chamber. Perhaps her mind is already made up—in which case that is very sad after such an emotive speech.

I have two issues with Mr Smyth’s motion. Firstly, the motion calls on this Assembly to micro-manage a subset of a branch within a government department. The logical extension of this is that this Assembly can move motions to direct government departments on how to use their shredding machines. That is how ridiculous this particular motion is!

You would think that these people would have more to do with their time and would address the issues of policy relating to this town rather than trying to micro-manage a department. If Mr Smyth becomes the Minister for Health in this town, pity us and the officers in the department. Their minister will want them to explain every single little detail. He will, I am afraid, be the most pathetic health minister this town has ever spawned.

I now turn to my substantive difficulty with this motion. In doing so, I call on my previous service in this area as administrative manager for a considerable number of years. In fact, I was part of the process in 1989 which sought to have a slow stream rehabilitation unit created—what we then called a convalescent unit. The Liberal Party cabinet allocated some $1.4 million, if my memory serves me correctly, for the creation of such a unit by the lake.

The Liberal government accepted the argument that a slow stream rehabilitation unit—we call it a step down unit or a sub-acute unit these days—would have a couple of interesting facets. In 1989 the late Professor Peter Sinnett, who was then the Director of the Rehabilitation Aged Care Service at the then Woden Valley Hospital, spoke to me about convalescent care—I was newly appointed to the position—and explained the difference between rehabilitation and other hospital services. He said that rehabilitation was to provide treatment in concert with a patient as opposed to other acute services where they do something to or in a patient. Rehabilitation is a partnership arrangement. He was explaining these details to me.

He said that there is a need for a community based recovery facility for people recovering from amputation, stroke, acquired brain injury and a range of other similar things. This will prevent inpatients from occupying acute beds when they are, in reality, occupying nursing home type beds. These beds should be in a community setting for rehabilitation patients and aged people who occupy beds for slow non-acute recovery. Rehabilitation patients and the elderly have a common issue—disability. The treatment regimes are often identical in clinical treatment and the time of recovery. Hospital and community services for these patients should be integrated.

Mr Smyth is trying to drive a wedge between nursing home type patients and patients in a rehabilitative perspective. They should be regarded as one and the same thing. If their clinical treatment regimes are so similar, we should be providing those services in the

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