Page 2406 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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Perhaps the minister would like to further investigate these allegations, and not shoot the messenger. It is about time they pulled down the shield, the veil—whatever is there or whatever is in their ears stopping them from hearing what people are trying to say in an effort to improve our public health system.
They want to do it their way or no way; they will do it at a very high cost. We will continue to see staffing shortages; we will continue to pump in around eight, 10 or 12 per cent more money every year, with less and less service delivery, less and less result. The minister needs to listen; she needs to listen carefully to the people and stop shouting me down in this place—and others who have spoken out.
As I have said, these are direct quotes from nurses and family members who have called, emailed and so forth. If the government wants to take these on board, they have the information; it is up to them what they do with it. As the minister and the Chief Minister have said, we cannot continue to pour money into a system, because it is going down the drain. Much of it is being wasted and squandered. It is not having the impact that Canberrans deserve, and that is a high level of service delivery across the health system.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Minister for Health, Minister for Children and Young People, Minister for Disability and Community Services, Minister for Women) (11.47): I rise to talk about this very important budget line in health and respond to some of the comments made by those opposite. This budget is a very good one for health. It manages increased activity and growing demand with a growth in resources and in budget injections, but not in line with some of the injections that we have seen in the past. So this year sees about a 5.1 per cent increase to health’s overall budget. That is in line with the government’s strategy to reduce costs within the health system to within 10 per cent of the national average which was announced last year. I am pleased to say that within a year we have moved our costs from 24 per cent above benchmark down to about 14 per cent. There is a bit more work to be done in that area, but the costs are coming down.
We are going to meet growing demand this year by injecting $10.5 million dollars into 20 additional beds. We are going to increase our critical care bed capacity. Further money is in the budget for aged care and community health services. We will provide 300 more elective surgery procedures above those delivered in the past financial year. We will inject some more money into cancer services to keep on top of the growth that we have seen there and also to provide support for the third linear accelerator. We will keep the access improvement program going to improve the emergency and elective patient management processes in 2007-08 which are already delivering the results that we have wanted to see.
More money is going into dental services to target the long waits on the dental waiting list. In mental health there is an additional $3 million to support the older persons mental health inpatient unit, which is operating over at Calvary, and some of that money will be used for emergency department nurses who specialise in mental health. There is $1.2 million for a 24-hour step-up, step-down facility, which has been long sought after, particularly by the community sector. There will be further money for enhancement of the psychiatric services unit in the short term. There is money for retraining and improving the skills of mental health workers.
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