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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Thursday, 26 August 2004) . . Page.. 4375 ..

The state of the environment report 2000 also said:

This figure does not take into account Canberra’s status as a major Regional health care provider. Accordingly, when we take into account that 26% of patients from council areas within the region are hospitalised in the ACT—the true availability of beds drops to as low as 1.53—if the whole population in the region is considered.

In the 1991 report, it was interesting to read, talking about the estimate that we needed to be looking at:

It is possible also that these estimates do not take into account the use of ACT hospital facilities by NSW patients. If this is so, the estimates would significantly understate the demand for beds. In the short time available, the Committee has not been able to check this point.

If the ACT Board of Health really is aiming for a figure of around 1000 public beds by the year 2000—

which is what they were being told at that point in time by the ACT Board of Health, 1,000 beds—

the Committee expresses its bewilderment at how the current reduction in public bed numbers fits into an overall strategy for the decade of bringing public beds to about 1000.

The select committee on hospital beds in 1991 said:

In 1989 the ACT had 914 available beds in its public hospitals and 169 in the private sector.

That is a total of 1,083. The report continues:

By June 1991the number of public bed had dropped to 897 with no change to the number of private beds.

By June 1992 the ACT Board of Health expects the number of public beds to be ‘somewhere in the range of 836 to 804’.

…

The reduction in public beds is in part related to the closure of Royal Canberra Hospital and the building demands of work at Woden Valley Hospital. But the reduction cannot wholly be assigned to these circumstances.

That is what they say in the select committee. I found this really interesting too. It is interesting because it is a political debate; it is exactly the same in lots of ways:

In declining to describe the bed reduction as ‘exceptional or dramatic’ but rather as ‘significant but not entirely unexpected’, the Chairman of the Board of Health stated …:

it is partly related to the fact that we’re now moving to one principal hospital and you can manage a bigger hospital differently—and I do not mean differently just

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