Page 2955 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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expect to continue to create even more capacity in our public hospital system. Mrs Burke has called for an independent inquiry into the tragic circumstances surrounding the death of a patient in the emergency department in recent weeks. She has called for the Auditor-General to investigate the emergency department. This call is totally unnecessary. As I already told the Assembly earlier today, the matter of the recent death at the Canberra Hospital has already been referred to the coroner. The coroner is independent and thorough. Is the opposition, by asking for a separate inquiry, suggesting that the coroner does not do her job properly? A clinical review is also underway, and these two processes will thoroughly look at all of the issues surrounding that tragic incident.
Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, this government has not been sitting on its hands. We are totally focused on addressing the increasing demand pressures on our public hospitals, including our emergency department. There is no doubt that we are experiencing very high growth in demand for our hospital services. In 2006-07, our public hospitals managed over 73,500 admitted patient cost-weighted separations. This is a growth of six per cent on the level of cost-weighted separations in 2005-06. So the government has responded to this increased demand by providing an additional $320 million to the health budget since coming to office in 2001, a 70 per cent increase in funding over just five years.
Since 2002-03, we have allocated approximately $134 million on budgeting issues which directly support our emergency departments and greater access to in-patient beds. What did we get for this money? Well, first of all, funding for an additional 147 beds, and, most importantly, the right mix of beds, including 60 acute care beds, four more intensive care beds, 51 beds for the subacute service, and 17 beds and two observation wards next to our emergency departments. These have been opened to increase capacity and address pressures in the system. On top of this, we funded 15 intermediate care beds in the community. These extra beds deliver improved clinical treatment options in care environments that have never previously been available in the ACT.
The 14-bed medical assessment and planning unit, which opened this year, and the 17 emergency department observation unit beds, which were funded in 2004-05, focus directly on the immediate bed requirements for our emergency departments. We have increased the bed capacity of our emergency departments, and these, along with other additional acute care beds, are increasing our capacity; they are reducing emergency department access block, and they are reducing the frequency of cancelled elective surgery.
Increasing the capacity of our hospitals improves patient flow and removes bottlenecks in the system. The subacute beds—the ones located at Calvary—and the intermediate care beds provide a more appropriate care setting for older people, and they free up the acute care beds for those people who need them most. Every subacute bed filled means one more acute bed available for more urgent cases. The 2005-06 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report that was released in May this year shows that the average number of beds available in our public hospital system here in the ACT jumped from 679 beds in 2004-05 to 714 beds in 2005-06, a 5.2 per cent increase. This increase came at a time, as I said in question time earlier today, when the national figure for available beds dropped by about one per cent.
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