Page 394 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 7 March 2006
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She then spent 4½ days in an observation ward where you are supposed to spend a maximum of 12 hours.
Most recently, and most alarmingly, my youngest son was prepped and ready for theatre and we had a three-quarter-hour altercation between the theatre department and the paediatrics unit over who should supply a paediatric central line while a distressed child waited for theatre to get under way. Simply no-one had a paediatric central line because there was no procedure about who should actually provide one to the theatre department.
There are many things that are wrong in the system. Yes, a lot of people come in and out of the hospital system and get a not-bad service, but for most of us who experience the hospital system the service could always be better and could provide better medical outcomes. I have sat in paediatric wards and watched people completely and utterly disempowered by the system. They do not know what questions to ask and they are not assisted because the staff do not have the time to assist people with a sick child to negotiate their way through the mire of the paediatric system. It is not for want of goodwill; it is just through want of resources. People do not have time to sit down and explain to parents what is happening when they are first-time attendees in a paediatric ward.
I am an experienced health consumer, unfortunately, and I still have trouble. I also come from a fairly articulate and forceful family, but we still have trouble finding out information when we need it when in the hospital system. Those problems are multiplied over and over again for people who do not have the capacity, the will, the intelligence or the basic information to allow them to ask the questions to get the right answers so that they can negotiate their way effectively through the medical system. That results in people being hospitalised for too long, not getting the right treatment and going home with the wrong treatments. These problems are increasing in our system.
Mr Corbell has been very up-front today in talking about access block. He has a new set of statistics that show that we are getting much better at dealing with access block. He said in his speech that back in December 2004 there was close to 40 per cent access block and that now we are down to much less than that, down around the low 20s. The thing that the minister did not tell us is that he is comparing apples with oranges. Until December 2004 the measure for determining access block seems to have been: how long have you been in the ED from when you first arrived? If you were there for more than eight hours, that was a case of access block. Now the method is that when it is decided that you need a hospital bed, if you have to wait more than eight hours, that is access block.
What Mr Corbell was talking about was a close to 50 per cent incidence on one measure in December 2004 going down to 30 per cent in November 2005 and, on his preferred new measure, going from 30 per cent to about 15 per cent over the same period. Mr Corbell did not compare apples with apples. He compared the high figure of the apples with the low figure of the oranges and said, “Look how wonderfully we are doing.” Mr Corbell has enjoined people to be honest in this place. He should participate in the debate honestly as well.
There is much that can be said about public health and the public health system and our failures and problems. I would like to touch briefly on one of those issues which is dear
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