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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3537 ..

The government is committed to working with the college to build further on the very considerable work already being done to make the ACT’s emergency departments better places in which to work and be treated.

I would like to reaffirm Mr Wood’s comments about the ACT public hospital system. The constant talk of crisis in our public hospitals is a slur on the hardworking clinicians and support staff in our hospitals who every day deliver excellent care across a large range of health services. Mr Smyth, our public hospitals treated 70,000 inpatients in 2003-04. That is an 8 per cent increase on the previous year. Obviously, that huge increase added significant pressure to the system, but I do not think a system in crisis could have managed an 8 per cent increase in activity.

Yes, our emergency department waiting times were longer in 2003-04 than in the previous year, but there was a 22 per cent increase in the number of serious emergency department presentations. Does Mr Smyth honestly believe that any government could have predicted at the beginning of the year a 22 per cent increase in serious emergency department presentations? Yes, this demand significantly increased the pressure on our emergency department staff and they have had to work extremely hard to manage this demand. Yet they have.

We know that this level of demand is not sustainable in the long term. So in acknowledgement of this unprecedented increase in serious emergency department presentations we have funded a range of new initiatives to speed up the transfers between emergency departments and wards. Mr Wood and I have often covered some of these. As Mr Wood noted, in the 2004-05 budget Labor provided funding for units at the Canberra Hospital and Calvary hospital for short-term observation adjacent to emergency departments to free up space in our emergency departments. It provided more funding for additional inpatient beds. Also, it established a rapid response team, which I have already talked about. This is a solid example of Labor responding effectively to a situation that could not have been predicted.

As has been mentioned previously in MPIs on the same issue, Labor, while acknowledging that more needs to be done, is not ashamed of its record in health. Some reminders for Mr Smyth’s benefit include: 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 $4 million to increase the salaries of our health professionals who were 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.

Over the last three years, we have funded our hospitals to meet the growth in demand for services, such as interventional cardiology, cancer services, renal services and emergency department care. We have funded increases in the costs of technology. We have funded additional registrars to reduce the pressure on young doctors and to improve the level of and access to care in our hospitals.

Our investment in our public hospitals has been accelerated in this year’s budget. We will fund an additional three intensive care beds at the Canberra Hospital at a cost of almost $12 million over the next four years. The $17 million provided over the next four years for additional general surgeons will improve rosters and increase access to general

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