Page 2767 - Week 09 - Thursday, 27 September 2007
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who assisted in its preparation. I would also like to thank the many people who made submissions to this inquiry and who took the time to write submissions. Many of them also appeared at committee hearings.
I also wish to acknowledge that the chairman’s draft of this report was prepared while Mr Mulcahy was the chair of the committee. I am sure that he will have some comments to make as well. As the chair, I commend the report to the Assembly and as a member of the committee and a member of the Assembly I would like to raise a couple of other issues.
People will note that the recommendations do ask for greater information. In fact, the first recommendation recommends that ACT Health inform the ACT Legislative Assembly of the results of the 2005 reporting review. In my time in the Assembly I have observed that issues related to acute care, whether it is length of waiting lists, waiting times or, as highlighted in the media today, lack of timely attention in emergency care services, have become so political that there is a danger that this might lead to less, rather than more, disclosure from governments and more spin and less willingness by governments to admit that there are problems.
Headlines will always be gained by the media from failures in the hospital system. I feel fairly convinced that human error and other problems will always arise, no matter how well resourced our hospital system is, and the mix of human tragedy and bureaucratic failure is far too heady for the media to resist. Nonetheless, our inquiry into waiting lists indicates that this is one area that should be responsive to government attempts to introduce strategies to reduce waiting times and to increase the length of time that surgical facilities are being used.
Perhaps the problem here lies in getting cooperation between all the different players in the system. I understand and acknowledge that this would be an extremely difficult task, but I do believe that waiting lists are far more tractable than emergency departments where the unpredictable is the norm. The thing about waiting lists is that they are lists and there is the potential for intervention.
The case study that the committee looked at most closely was the Auburn program in Sydney. It provided an instructive case study for the committee. One of the reasons for its success, I think, is that it is fully supported and, to some extent, driven by the medical specialists and surgeons themselves. There seems to be a high degree of cooperation around that, which perhaps is a lesson in itself. Because this is an ongoing and an important issue, we hope that our report does progress discussion upon it. We very much look forward to receiving the government’s response.
MR MULCAHY (Molonglo) (12.07): I would like to say a few words on this report. It was a lengthy inquiry, which has been acknowledged by Dr Foskey. It was essentially chaired and taken to the chairman’s draft stage while I was presiding over the public accounts committee.
Elective surgery waiting lists, of course, are a major concern in the Canberra community. This report is the culmination of an in-depth investigation into the situation in the ACT and, as has been mentioned, extended also to examine the
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