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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3527 ..

I refer to Goodwin Aged Care Services. For 2½ years it asked for a block of land. A couple of weeks back it finally got the go ahead, but it now has to go through the draft variation process to confirm it. I have numerous examples of other organisations that have been caught in this government’s planning quagmire that cannot do their job because this government will not let them. We have bed block at the back end of the hospital system, which is filled with nursing home-type patients. We have blockages at the front end in the emergency department. Those blockages flow on to all aspects of the hospital, affect people who are trying to gain access to hospital beds for surgery or recovery, and also affect people on hospital waiting lists.

Often those people are bumped off the waiting lists because the hospitals cannot cope as a result of this government’s improper management. Mr Deputy Speaker, you know a great deal about nursing home-type patients because you have been drawing attention to them for many years. In that time numerous nursing homes have tried to build facilities, only to be stymied by this government. Another issue that this government has let slide—it is an issue that will now take almost five years to complete—is the step-down facility.

The previous government acknowledged that there were difficulties and that we needed to find a way to get some of the more well patients who required less attention out of the system and into a facility where they could easily be accommodated at a much-reduced cost to the system. That concept has been called the step-down facility. The former government announced that proposal in March 2001 and money was allocated in the May 2001 budget to enable its construction.

In August 2004, more than three years later, we are yet to see a sod turned or the submission of a development application for that subacute step-down facility. That project is now worth about $10 million—costs have grown significantly in that time—but we have not yet had any commitment from this government to make that happen. All we had from the health minister was a feeble excuse that the department had not driven the project as well as it could have. The minister also said that he was disappointed.

The minister might be disappointed, but that disappointment is reflected in the lives of ordinary Canberrans on hospital waiting lists who, when it is their turn for surgery, cannot gain immediate access to emergency departments or to their public hospital system. It is well and good for the minister to be disappointed but this facility, which has languished for almost five years, will only be opened in February 2006. I somehow doubt that it will be opened then, based on this government’s record expenditure on capital works. So members can see why our hospital system is in crisis.

This government’s biggest failure is to ignore staff and to write them off. I refer again to the bureaucratic model. Practitioners on the ground, nurses, wards men, specialists, doctors and all those at the coalface are voicing dissatisfaction with the system. We were told at the last estimates committee hearings that 31 per cent of nurses would leave the system. Later the Minister referred to a different figure, but the official and uncorrected figure that was given at the last estimates committee hearings was 31 per cent. Nurses are leaving the system because they cannot do what they want to do—that is, care for sick and ill Canberrans. They cannot do that because they are not being given the tools to do their job. That is why we have this litany of failings by the government.

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