Page 2693 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Elective surgery waiting lists are coming down. They are trending down; procedures are up. There were 9,071 procedures in the last year. That is a record for the territory. We want to see that continue, which is why we are continuing to invest in it.
I am not convinced that reporting on bypass is going to help anything. It is not used as a performance indicator of any measure in any report done on the health system across the country. For the arguments I talked about in question time, I just do not see the point. Mr Smyth gets the table every morning, anyway. He is fully informed of the level of bypass—as I said, earlier than I am. Mr Smyth tells me it is 10 hours. I have no reason not to believe him, because his leaked information in the past has been very accurate. But I have not had that confirmed by the department of health. The latest advice to me, which I received on Monday, was that by 19 August there had been eight hours of bypass. I stick by that. Mr Smyth tells me it is 10 hours. He is probably right, but I have not received that advice from the department.
The government is committed to continuing the Healthpact grants program at the level they are. We are doing the work now on the process for those grants. I want to make sure that they remain with community representation. It is a big load of money. Mr Smyth is right. We do not necessarily have that expertise within the department. I need to be very transparent about that. I accept that. We have sought some savings in the administration of Healthpact. It would not have been a tough job, let me say, working in Healthpact. What a great job!
Mr Mulcahy: Are you saying they are bludgers?
MS GALLAGHER: No, I am not saying they are bludgers at all. I am just saying that we thought that some efficiencies could be found by returning it to the department to be delivered, because of the fact that we have staff in the department administering grants programs already.
Mr Mulcahy: That is one way to cut your costs: sack them all.
MS GALLAGHER: No, they did not. We have lost, I think, four. I think there were eight staff, including the chief executive officer, administering that program. I think we are going down to four. Whether they accept redeployment or whatever, we will reduce the administrative costs of that program through this way. There is a change there. I need to be transparent about that, and I will, like the money from pay parking. Again, we have promised that all of that money will be reinvested in the health system. I accept that people need to see that, and I will look at how I report against that. But this is an area of large expenditure for the government.
I take Mr Smyth’s point on the community co-payments or eligibility. We probably could have handled that a bit better. It was not necessarily linked to the budget because there are no savings and no costs in there. It was a piece of work that we could have done, not linked it to the budget and, therefore, not had people concerned about it. That discussion paper will be coming out soon. I have not seen it yet. It has almost been finalised and will go out to the community—
Mr Smyth: Do you want to look at it?
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .