Page 2890 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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warned about the situation in our hospital system. They warned on 30 July, and I quote:
It has become essential to notify the ACT community that staffing levels in the public and private health sectors, cannot sustain the work demands on health services and that nurses are concerned that standards of care may be compromised and need to alert the community of this genuine concern.
That is from an ANF media release of 30 July this year. That is strong stuff from a union. To warn that standards of care may be compromised would not be a step that that union would have taken lightly. What has been the attitude of the government to criticism? It has been all about denial. The Chief Minister told us on radio on the ABC:
We have a wonderful system here. The level of care and outcomes from Canberra Hospital are exceptional.
Unfortunately, the experience of the patient who suffered a coronary in the waiting room at the emergency services department at TCH for four hours does not bear that out. Sadly, he later died.
We have heard received many stories—and this has been discussed in the Assembly—of very bad experiences in our public health system. A man who had a heart attack in Bowral where he received intensive care was sent to Canberra Hospital for his recovery. After being taken out of the ambulance, he had to sit in the waiting room for hours. One member of the hospital staff told his family he was lucky to have had his heart attack in Bowral, because he would not have survived had he had it in Canberra. We get a number of stories told to us by various staff at the hospitals. They want to do their best—they do their best in difficult circumstances. There are a number of other horrific stories that I am not going to go into. The sad point is that the average waiting time in emergency is now eight hours. That has blown out dramatically since the Stanhope government came to office: in 2001 it was about two hours.
We have a crisis in the public health system, which affects everyone who uses it, notwithstanding the valiant work of our hardworking nurses and our doctors. On every major indicator, the ACT hospitals rate last or second last in Australia. According to the Australian hospitals statistics released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in May this year, for elective surgery the ACT has the longest wait in the country at 61 days. This was worse than last year’s report, where the wait was 45 days. So what we are seeing is continued deterioration as a result of this government’s management, or, rather, lack thereof. But who does the government blame? The government says the hospital sees thousands of people, as if it is acceptable that the odd one should receive suboptimal treatment of a kind to imperil life.
Of course, Mr Stanhope is always banging on about how the Liberals, he claims, closed 114 beds while in office. It seems that, on checking Hansard, that figure could not be substantiated. He did not mention the 200 beds closed by the previous Follett Labor administration, and his claim that he made up the beds numbers, that were not,
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