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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2949 ..

Committee. It happens every year and I think it happened when Mr Quinlan was chair of the Estimates Committee. I am just raising it as an issue again.

MRS DUNNE (9.08): The extraordinarily large sums of money in the budget for health are important; they need to be there. The $530 million is a fifth of the budget and goes to provide a range of much-needed services for the people in the ACT. But, as Mr Smyth has said, we seem to be paying for more and getting less. It is time that this government started to address some of the issues: the extension of waiting times for elective surgery, the extension of waiting times at accident and emergency and the range of measures, small and large, in the health budget where we are underperforming.

I had an interesting time on Saturday evening at one of the functions that I was very pleased to attend, the 25th anniversary dinner ball or celebration of Calvary Public Hospital. It was very interesting to spend an evening amongst very committed health professionals, whether they be administrative staff, nurses, midwives, doctors or pharmacists. Everyone there was committed to Calvary and everyone seemed to have a story. They would come and say, “Mrs Dunne, I have got this problem. I am really concerned about this” and they would then enumerate the problems and injustices they saw in the health system and the way in which Calvary was dealt with in the health system—the fact that it was not allowed to perform to its optimum level because of what they considered were inappropriate cuts to funding.

A doctor said to me in the course of the evening, “I can’t keep trained theatre staff. If the money runs out in April and I can’t do my speciality, I can’t keep those staff sitting around effectively doing nothing or doing something that they’re not trained to do to the same degree until the money comes on stream in July again. Then you have to ramp up—go out and find specialist nurses to ensure that you can do the work. It is just not a tap that you can turn on and off.”

These complaints were coming to me thick and fast. A range of doctors and professionals are saying this. Do members of this place know that 48 per cent of all presentations to accident and emergency happen at Calvary Hospital? When we talk about the public hospital system in the ACT, we tend to think about the Canberra Hospital. But 48 per cent of all people—the proportion is growing—who go to accident and emergency in the ACT go to Calvary Hospital. This will continue to increase as the population of Gungahlin and Belconnen increases. As Dunlop increases in size, as Crace and Lawson come on line—all the new suburbs in Gungahlin—the pressures on Calvary Hospital will be enormous.

One of the myriad of things that were said to me—it was repeated over and over again—was: “If only we could deal with our bed blockers. We could get people out of accident and emergency if we had a bed to put them in, but we cannot do that because of the bed blockers.”

That brought me to a discussion I had with a number of people about the much-thwarted aged-care facility across the road from the Calvary campus that has been going on and on. Recommendation 48 of the Estimates Committee report states:

The Committee recommends that the Government take steps to ensure the continuation of this project.

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