Page 2411 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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MR SPEAKER: Order, Mrs Burke!
MS GALLAGHER: There was quite a lot of anger around your comment that the ACT has a Third-World hospital system, including those that run Calvary public hospital. I do not know the last time Mrs Burke visited the hospital, but I am out at the hospital on a weekly basis talking to staff and visiting different parts of the hospital. I am not aware that she has been out there once.
In emergency surgery, we have delivered seven per cent more than we had in the previous year. Our elective surgery we have talked about. Our emergency department is busy. Our staffing over the past two months has been a very difficult issue. Calvary health care will tell you on any morning they are dealing with 20 people ringing in saying they are sick and are unable to work, and then they have to backfill those positions. These things are managed on a daily basis, but in a one-month period there were 5,500 hours of personal leave being taken that were having to be replaced. That was 1,000 personal leave hours more than the previous year. We will look at those high levels of sick leave. To my understanding, it is largely put down to school holidays, children being sick and nurses being sick. We will have a look at the high utilisation of personal leave.
This budget delivers on key areas in health. It is about keeping people out of hospital, better management of them but balancing that with more beds and targeted services into particular areas of pressure. I know no-one opposite can really talk about anything other than bad experiences and elective surgery and the emergency department, but a lot in this budget will be very good for the people of Canberra, including those vulnerable women and children to whom we are going to provide much better ante-natal and post-natal care services.
I thank members for their contributions. I hope that they have listened to some of the facts and not some of the cliches that have been offered today and provide some rational fodder for future discussions on health.
Proposed expenditure agreed to.
Proposed expenditure—Part 1.11—Department of Territory and Municipal Services, $266,922,000 (net cost of outputs), $147,451,000 (capital injection) and $964,000 (payments on behalf of the territory), totalling $415,337,000.
MR MULCAHY (Molonglo) (12.08): Obviously, the combined outlays here of some $415 million represent a significant part of the ACT budget. I have a few comments in relation to territory and municipal services, and my colleague Mr Pratt will speak in more detail on some of these key areas. In estimates committee hearings on 26 June, members of the opposition attempted to obtain some information on how this department is running and to scrutinise the information that was published in the budget papers. Unfortunately, this attempt for greater transparency in this area was largely unsuccessful. There are many outstanding questions from both estimates committee hearings and questions on notice from this process that really lack any substantial answer. Instead, the minister has obscured those areas that he does not wish to talk about. I will certainly give some examples for the benefit of the Assembly.
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