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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Thursday, 26 August 2004) . . Page.. 4376 ..

in terms of systems and so forth, but it really does give you a greater flexibility as to how you use it to respond to patient need because doing it in two hospitals clearly led to inefficiencies of use. I am not talking about money now, I am talking about the actual physical processes of using operating theatres and all of those sorts of things.

The Committee considers the Board has been surprisingly reticent about the nature of the other reasons behind its reduction in public hospital beds.

In terms of managing the 1991-92 recurrent budget for health, the Board outlined its options in a communication to the Minister in late September or October of this year.

Basically they go on to describe all these different options.

The submission from the ACT Board of Health at that point gave a figure of around 1,000 public hospital beds as a target for the year 2000 and the estimate of private beds would be between 174 and 269. That is a total of around 1,269.

Then we look at what we have now according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare for 2002-03, and that is 1,090. So if we remove 80 to reflect the impact of day surgery—and there may be other issues you have to remove; I do not know; this is basic sums that I can do—from the 1991 projection, it still leaves 1,189, which we are now 99 beds short of. Plus, if you actually have a look at the increase in the number of hobby farms around the ACT, I think the projections of the 1991 report—I do not know if there have been more projections done; I was not able to find that—would be really interesting to look at in comparison to what we now know to be the reality of the region that we are servicing.

In the 1999 report as well it was interesting to note that they did not talk a lot about population and what they were imagining it would increase to, except they were arguing actually about the population of the ACT at that point, but they were saying it was around 280,000. But they were expressing concerns about the capacity to understand the influence of regional patients and the acuteness of those patients. That, I know, has come up before in debates that we have had in the Assembly, which I have certainly engaged in and been aware of. The acuteness of New South Wales patients actually would make the needs of this hospital as a regional hospital more significant.

Now we have got extra pressure from private patients actually taking public hospital beds. Members would be aware that there has been quite a damning report put out not that long ago by the Australian Private Hospitals Association—I think I can find that quote—basically saying that the public hospitals were poaching private patients. The public patients have greater difficulty accessing the beds.

The point I want to make—and I am not going to go on because there are more figures—is that it is really quite fascinating reading this 1991 report and seeing the expectations that have clearly not been met. We have had this constant argument occurring between both sides of the house since I have been here.

I think I heard Dr Sherbon say that numbers are not really accurate now because we do things differently. But I would really like to see the analysis that proves that. I know we

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