Page 3276 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 13 November 2007
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The ACT public hospital system is an excellent system. As I have said a number of times, if you are going to get sick, Canberra is the best place to get sick. We are lucky, in a community of our size—
Mr Mulcahy: Ha, ha!
Mrs Burke: It’s a nice thing to say!
MS GALLAGHER: Mr Mulcahy and Mrs Burke scoff at that. They do not realise when they scoff that they are actually running down the reputation of the Canberra Hospital as a regional, tertiary referral hospital, a teaching hospital. We have the ANU medical school there now; people are wanting to come here because of our hospital, because of the opportunities that it will provide for students. By running it down, they disadvantage the medical workforce and the health professional workforce. They scoff at it, but if there is a place to get sick, the public know where that is. And do you know why? Do you know how you can tell? All the national data that we have show that utilisation of public hospitals in the ACT is the highest in the country, bar the Northern Territory, I believe, and that is because there are no private hospitals in the Northern Territory. Our utilisation of public hospitals for elective surgery, again, is much higher than the national average.
Our patients are not choosing to go to the private system; they are choosing to have their surgery performed in the public system, more so than anywhere else in the country, despite the fact that we have the highest level of private health insurance coverage in the country. So how does that work out? With 52 per cent of the community with private health insurance, there is the lowest utilisation of that insurance—they are coming to the public hospital. Our hospitals are busy and they are delivering excellent service and a first-rate quality of care.
In relation to the management of the hospital, I am absolutely convinced that we have an excellent management team at the hospital. This management team is made up of doctors and nurses, and administrators who, more often than not, have been doctors and nurses and who take over management roles in the hospital. The number of administrative positions in the hospital is reducing, and has reduced consistently over a number of years, as we seek to tighten the budget and make sure that we are focusing expenditure on front-line staff. We are opening more beds, as I said. Mrs Burke made the comment that 30 rooms are used for administration; I think that was what she said.
Mrs Burke: I did not. I think Mark Cormack said that, actually.
MS GALLAGHER: Well, you used it in your speech. Those rooms are there because 114 beds were cut out of the public hospital system and not funded by the Liberal government. We are resuming each and every one of those rooms as we open more beds. All of those wards are being resumed. We opened the MAPU last year; we are opening another ward shortly. So that administrative space is being resumed. I would note that hospitals do need administrative staff to run them and I would question where they are going to go. A hospital is made up of wards, and rooms within wards,
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