Page 2403 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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MR SMYTH: Thank you, Mr Speaker. We know that if children are obese, as adults they have an enormously increased chance of cancer. Cancer treatments are costly and very time consuming; we need to reduce that. The way to start is to make sure that we have got the best preventative health plan in the country, and we do not. There is no commitment to preventative health. Health packs have been drawn back, through last year’s reforms, into the department.
What we have not got from the minister—and, through the minister, the government—is the right attitude. The answers are always management solutions. They have got to be service solutions. We have got to give the troops in the front line the sense of attitude—the nurses and doctors in particular, but also the physios, the OTs and all those other staff such as allied health workers and, to back them up, the cleaners, the cooks and the admin staff. The attitude is defensive. The attitude is cagey. The attitude is ad hoc. That is because of the arrangements that the government has put in. Nothing I have seen or heard from successive ministers and their myriad plans says that they understand this dilemma.
We have to start, through Mr Barr and the schools, in sport and recreation. But there has to be a link with health. And then we have to have the services for those that need them. It is not enough for the minister to say, “But we have been busy.” Hospitals are busy places. You only go to them normally in an emergency. You do not plan to go to a hospital, unless it is a pregnancy. In the main, hospitals are on emergency footings.
Members interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Smyth has the call.
MR SMYTH: We know, because over the years we have seen it, that the need for hospitals will increase. We know that the aged population of the ACT is well below the national average. We know that it is ageing rapidly. The over 65s, 75s and 85s will double, triple and quadruple over the next decade or 15 years. We know that we need to get it right now, but we are not. We have an ad hoc arrangement from an ad hoc government that has no idea how to run health.
Let us look at the indicators that are here. Again, I go back to strategic indicator No 3, reaching the optimum occupancy rate for acute, adult, overnight hospital beds. At the heart of any hospital is the ability to have a bed. Nothing can be done either in the ER or the hospital without a bed. Having those beds—properly equipped, with adequate supplies nearby to ensure that procedures can be carried out in the wards as required; appropriately staffed by well-trained, well-motivated, well-rested staff who are not overworked, overtired and suffering low morale—is the secret.
The government has to go and talk to the nurses. Again I refer the minister to the ImpactED nurse website. They were looking for answers; they were looking to be part of the solution. They have much to offer; they feel ignored. When you get to the stage where, as a nurse said to me, executives—the senior staff—are coming down to help make beds, then you have a problem in your hospital system. If you ignore it, we all suffer as a community. We all know someone who will go to the hospital in the next year; we all have a loved one, a friend or a work colleague who will need the system. If we ignore it, we are putting them at great risk.
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