Page 2684 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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set in stone. But opening those theatres for an extra hour a day is just going to put more pressure upstairs.
You cannot have the surgery until you have a bed. If there is no bed, you cannot have the surgery. By having an extra hour of surgery a day—the minister can tell you how many theatres of the 16 that will apply to—there is the potential for greater throughput, but greater throughput would mean a greater need for beds. At the other end of the equation, we are saying that we have people coming into the emergency department and sitting there, according to the AIHW, for the longest waits in the country. They are sitting there for the longest waits in the country because, after they are diagnosed as needing to be admitted, a bed cannot be found for them. So the conflict goes on.
The problem is that we are dramatically under-represented in bed numbers. The ACT had 2.2 beds per 1,000 head of population in 2004-05 against the 2.7 beds it had in 1998-99 under the former Liberal government, according to the Department of Health and Ageing. So there has been a half a bed reduction, almost a fifth of the total number of beds, under this government: 2.7 under the former Liberal government and 2.2 under the ACT government now. In contrast, Queensland has 2.5 beds per 1,000 head of population, 20 per cent above what we have, and Peter Beattie is now out on the hustings saying that more beds are needed there to address elective surgery problems. If the minister does not want to listen to me, she might like to listen to her colleague Mr Beattie, who has recognised the fact that without the beds you cannot deliver.
That is the first point. The second is that we do not have a handle on what is going on in the system. The minister has said that they have spent $13 million extra over the last couple of years on elective surgery. I can look through the papers and find $38 million that has gone to elective surgery, so the government has actually pumped in a lot more money than the minister or the government is saying, with far less result. The problem is that we are not using it wisely.
Until we go back to focusing on those who deliver at the coalface—our excellent nurses, our doctors and our allied health professionals—instead of following the bureaucratic model which has seen created the monolith that is the department of health, married to the hospital and meshed, we are not going to get the service imperative that the people of the ACT and its surrounds deserve. We have to look at the model the government has set up. We have had three health ministers, four or five reforms and a couple of hundred million extra dollars put into the health budget. The dollars are welcome, but why aren’t we getting a result? That is the question the minister has to answer.
The pay parking situation is nothing short of a fiasco. Again, the figures vary. Minister Corbell told us last year when the initiative first surfaced that it would raise between $500,000 and $800,000 for the hospital. Minister Gallagher told us it would be $800,000 and then, because of concessions of 10 per cent, it went to $720,000. Following a press release in which I said that it should not go ahead at all, she said that that would deny to the people of the ACT $1 million a year worth of equipment. It cannot be $500,000, $800,000, $720,000 and $1 million all at the same time. That just shows the rubbery nature of the document that the government has presented to us and people have to question how much they should believe the document.
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