Page 2407 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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We are also doubling our investment in the mental health community coalition to work with the community in providing services for people with mental illness. That is really important in the sense that government services are there to support people when they are having particular episodes of mental illness, but recovery from mental illness occurs in the community, so it is important that we have a very strong community health sector.
The budget also provides for design of three key capital projects. One is the adult mental health inpatient facility and also high-security mental health inpatient facility. I have heard the comments from those opposite. We have not provided the funding in the outyears primarily so that we can refine the costs over this year for when we design and plan those big projects, and also continue our consultations with the community. It is fair to say there is an agreement on the model that should be in place for residential psychiatric services at the hospital. There is a very strong community view about the number of beds that should be provided, and we are having to balance that with the view of government about providing beds for the future. Primarily, that is why this budget sees it funded to the forward design stage and does not fund it in the outyears. But that is not to say that the government would spend almost $3.5 million and then not fund it as a future facility. We just have to get prices right and the design right.
There is also money for extending our neo-natal intensive care unit. We are a regional provider of neo-natal services, intensive care services. We need to grow the unit. Anyone who has visited the unit will see that there needs to be some massive improvements to that to look after our most vulnerable babies and their families. Of course, this budget has money for a multistorey car park. The multistorey car park will need to be built first. This is interlinked with the inpatient facilities in the psychiatric precinct, because the psychiatric precinct will have to be built where current surface car parks are. We cannot take the car parks out and not have them replaced to build the inpatient facilities unless we fix the car parking. So that has been funded in this project.
As I said, I heard those opposite say that there is no money for chronic disease or any health promotions. There is a significant amount of money for the human papilloma vaccination program for the ACT-commonwealth—mainly commonwealth funded. There is half a million dollars integrated prevention for chronic disease. Shortly, I will be going out with the chronic disease strategy, which we have been working very closely on with GPs to get really best practice working here. In the non-government sector, there is indexation to 3.75 per cent. Money is going out to the community sector for the 24-hour mental health step-up, step-down facility. As I said, there is money for the Mental Health Community Coalition. There is nine per cent growth in home and community care, and money there for expanded youth health services, growing to half a million dollars in 2008-09.
This budget will improve our elective surgery removals from waiting lists. Our target will be 9,620, which is almost 2,000 more operations than were being delivered in 2002. The evidence just does not back up that the money we are spending is producing less. People need to be encouraged to read the reports and see that the money being invested is producing much more, and more than we expected.
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