Page 2965 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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The ACT government funds CALMS to provide this service for the ACT community. The current service funding agreement between ACT Health and CALMS is for the period July 2006 until June 2009, for an amount of up to $288,132 per quarter or over $1 million per annum. This is just one example of how the ACT government has invested in health services to help reduce the demand for emergency department services and acute hospital care.
Other initiatives include the access improvement program, which has already been spoken about, better hospital discharge practices, expanded home and community care services to keep people healthy and well in their own homes and a focus on prevention, such as successful falls prevention in the elderly initiatives.
But that is not all we have been doing. We have also been lobbying for more GP assistance. The ACT government has repeatedly written to the Australian government telling them that the district-of-workforce shortage, a strategy that attempts to ensure that there is an effective and equitable system for the distribution of the medical workforce, does not work in a place the size of the ACT.
The Australian government will only grant overseas trained doctors a Medicare provider number to practise medicine in Australia if they are working in areas classified as a district-of-workforce shortage. There is a strong argument for declaring the ACT a district-of-workforce shortage so that the lack of GPs can be addressed as quickly as possible, but our health system will always be struggling if the Australian government refuses to fix this.
The ACT government has been working long and hard to get the Australian government to understand this situation, but its effort has been falling on deaf ears. What this means for the ACT public is that if we only have the national average number of GPs there would be an additional $15 million of Australian government funding. If we account for the additional services that GPs order, which would include items such as X-rays and private pathology, the shortfall is more like $18 million.
Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not have enough time to go through the rest of my notes, but I think I have highlighted that there are a number of things that we are doing.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (5.01): Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is great the Chief Minister has returned because I am going to start by reading from the ministerial code of conduct which says:
Ministers should take reasonable steps to ensure the factual content of statements they make in the Assembly are soundly based and that they correct any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity.
Today we have heard that the cost for an acute care bed is $1,460 and, based on that—
Mr Stanhope: On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker: this is a direct, actual aspersion suggesting that I misled the Assembly and that I need to correct the record. I did no such thing, and I would ask that the member actually withdraw it. In fact, it is
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