Page 2674 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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I will not accept that the system is not working well. I will accept that there are pressures on the system and there is a range of measures in place to deal with those pressures.
They say perception is reality, and there is certainly, despite the minister’s protestations, a very wide-held perception in our community that the health system in the ACT is not in great shape. Can all these people that raise it with us be wrong—these constituents who write in and tell members on both sides of the Assembly that things are not up to the mark? The criticism that was made earlier today about the fact that Mr Smyth publishes these statistics fails to respond to what the statistics in fact tell you: there are underlying and endemic problems within the health system in Canberra and a level of problems that should not be acceptable in this jurisdiction.
The minister mentioned a range of measures that have been put in place through the 2006-07 budget. Looking at these measures, however, one wonders whether they are serious enough to achieve the costs savings and performance improvements that the people of the ACT sorely need and quite rightly deserve. Dr Sherbon gave a frank assessment of where the key areas of focus are in this budget, stating:
We know that some of our costs are higher than they should be. Administrative costs are a problem for us.
I repeat that:
Administrative costs are a problem for us.
It is one of the biggest problems in ACT Health. He continued:
We know that we have a higher RN to EN ratio—registered nurse to enrolled nurse—than peer hospitals throughout the country ... We know that we could do better with the purchasing of consumables and medical supplies.
Why are they waiting until now to find out all these things? We have a government that has been in since 2001 and now we are starting to realise all these problems. The minister also expressed the need to increase staff numbers within the department, stating:
There is a range of new initiatives in this budget for which we are expecting a staffing component of around 91. Some of that is in cancer services—
commendable—
for example, the employment of an extra oncologist and some nurse coordinators—and there is an additional registered nurse in that initiative. In the mental health initiative, there is the employment of an additional mental health specialist. So yes, we are increasing the number of front-line services.
Ordinarily the issue of public service staffing is a sensitive one, particularly in the current environment of proposed staffing cuts to save money and recover some of the expenses that have been wasted on staffing by this government in the past. But in health,
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