Page 385 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 7 March 2006
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All of this is evidence of the impact of the government’s three-pronged approach to improving access to hospital services, an approach I outlined over a year ago in my statement on access to care. Firstly, we are working on reducing the demand for emergency and acute hospital care. We are doing this through our support for after-hours GP services and clinics, better hospital discharge practices, expanded HACC services to keep people healthy and well in their own homes, and focusing on prevention such as our successful falls-prevention-in-the-elderly initiatives.
Secondly, we are increasing the capacity of our hospital and healthcare systems. We have funded an additional 20 acute medical beds, and these have been online since July last year. We have provided an additional $15 million over the last three years to improve access to elective surgery. This will have provided more than 2,500 more operations over the last three years than would otherwise have been the case.
We have introduced discharge lounges to free up acute care beds. We have funded services that provide for high-needs children to be cared for at home, also freeing up acute care beds. We have funded an additional three intensive care unit beds, reducing blockages and providing more access for elective surgery. We have filled the first 10 beds of the new 60-bed sub and non-acute aged care beds facility, with the next 50 coming on stream in December 2006. When complete, this will add an additional 51 new beds to the system.
We have commissioned the ninth operating theatre at the Canberra Hospital, which increases patient flows and reduces elective surgery postponements. And we have established short-stay inpatient units next to our emergency departments to further improve access to care, and adding a further 17 beds to our hospital system.
Let us add all those figures up. That is 50 extra beds on line now, with another 41 being built by December 2006. That is 91 beds, Mr Smyth. But when you count the 15 additional transitional care beds for the elderly which have been commissioned by the Baptist Community Services at Carey Gardens for June—and it has been jointly funded by the ACT and the commonwealth governments—that takes the total number of additional beds in our system to 114. So for all the carping and parroting by the Leader of the Opposition, if we only implemented his boastful but ill-informed claim for extra beds, we would actually be going backwards by 14 beds.
Thirdly, we are changing the way we do things in our hospitals. On top of reducing demand and increasing capacity, we are changing our work practices and modernising the way our hospitals organise their care systems. This approach is being adopted in the $1.2 million access improvement program. AIP seeks to redesign care delivery systems based on the concept of patient journeys and is built up by frontline clinical staff who know the day-to-day realities of managing emergency and acute care.
We have also managed the way we provide services as we refocus our services on patient needs. This has included the establishment of the capital region cancer service and the aged care and rehabilitation service. Both these services bring together the inpatient, outpatient and community services that provide care to people in the target populations so that they get more seamless service that improves care and improves their health outcomes. These streams provide a more patient-centred focus, and this approach will
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