Page 2309 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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But let me just give my observations. They are fairly basic. I have a family: the kids get sick; my wife has a valve in her heart which necessitates certain medical treatment. I have coached sporting teams, so I have taken people to hospitals. I have noticed some really basic things. For example, in A and E, waiting times used to be two hours on average. That is backed up by statistical data. Now it is eight hours. I first noticed that in 2003 and I have noticed it on a number of occasions since. In some instances, it is a hell of a lot longer than eight hours. I have had cause to correspond with several health ministers of this current government in relation to some of those issues, one involving an 85-year-old woman who had to wait about 3¾ days for her arm to be fixed up. Clearly, there are some issues there. I hope that something is being done.
I want to again mention a matter that I raised in estimates. In April, my wife broke her wrist in Sydney. She was treated at Bathurst hospital. I commend them—one hour, 10 minutes; good job. But she was told to check it out in Canberra. We go down to Canberra. I did not think that it was that suspicious that she had to register again in Calvary—that is fair enough; it is a different state. But we went to Canberra hospital that night for an 8 o’clock appointment. That was good, but there were two staff stations, and in the course of the appointment she was sent from one to the other and they took the details again. I would have thought that perhaps we could have got them from Calvary. Then she had to go back to the next staff station—which had sent her to the first one to start with—and they took all the details again. I thought, “Hello. Let’s cut out the middleman here.” I raised this in estimates, and I was assured that those sorts of things are being attended to. And they need to be, because that is just crazy. It is a waste of time and a waste of staffing resources. Perhaps you might need only one of those staff instead of two, and that might mean an extra nurse somewhere. Then, of course, my wife actually saw the doctor.
And then there was going into the fracture clinic: great staff there, but not terribly many of them, with people waiting around for hours on end. It took ages before people could get a bed. The staff seemed to be run off their feet. I think that they were meant to finish at 5.30 or six. On a couple of occasions when I went there, they were still going at 8 o’clock. I have nothing but praise for the staff there, but again there is a resourcing issue. That lends weight to the points raised by the ANF in relation to staffing levels and the safe accommodation of patients. It lends weight to what Mrs Burke is trying to do today.
I know it is difficult to get nurses. Again, we discussed this at estimates, and I would certainly commend it to the minister. A lot of the older nurses basically went through the old classic apprenticeship—doing their nurse training in the hospital as opposed to the degree nurses. I think you need both. I am pleased to see that now at least some moves are being made to ensure that we can have people who do not have to get a degree who can go into those nursing jobs and that there are various levels so that we can get people into the system a lot more quickly than might have been the case in the past. We need to explore that.
Of course, someone coming in at the base level as an assistant can study and progress up the chain—maybe get a degree some day, if that is what they want. But we need to ensure that we at least get people in that capacity into the system as soon as possible so that there are adequate staff to look after patients—so that nurses are not run off
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