Page 3277 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 13 November 2007
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and we do have administrative staff who need to have workstations and who need to work at the hospital. So there is a requirement to have administrative space within a hospital and, as I said, we are resuming the majority of that space for the beds that we have funded over the last few years.
We have a targeted, focused approach to dealing with efficiencies in the hospitals. I noticed there was not a great deal of time spent on Calvary by Mrs Burke. The text of the MPI did refer to “the management of public hospitals in the ACT”, but I did not think there would be a great deal of focus on the management of Calvary. Really, the MPI should have referred to “the management of the Canberra Hospital”. We have a number of measures in place to deal with it. Mrs Burke says there are inefficiencies within the hospital. I am happy to look at it. Where she identifies inefficiencies, I am happy to look at the matter and see whether that is the case. More often than not, when Mrs Burke is asked to stump up and prove some of her claims, she is unable to do so.
Mrs Burke: That is not true.
MS GALLAGHER: Mrs Burke, you have not been able to prove anything yet. Anything that you have alleged in the hospital system has either not been true or it has been factually incorrect from the beginning. There are good indicators that some of the areas of pressure within our hospitals are being addressed through our access improvement program. Our hospital bed occupancy rate is down to 91 per cent, compared with 97 per cent in the same quarter in 2005-06. That is a big result, and I think we are heading towards a target of 85 per cent, to ensure that we have beds available for people being admitted.
Ambulance off-stretcher times continue to improve. With respect to access block at both of the hospitals, it is down on where it was. I think it reached a peak of 44 per cent in 2004-05; it is down to 26.3 per cent in 2006-07. Our hospitals are doing very well, Mrs Burke. Unfortunately, I do not think the introduction of a hospital board will make the slightest difference, apart from adding another layer—
Mrs Burke: You don’t want the community involved then? I see.
MS GALLAGHER: The community is very involved in health care in the ACT. I think a hospital board, as we have seen in some of the announcements by the federal government, will increase bureaucracy at a time when you are talking about trying to reduce bureaucracy. In fact, when you reflect on the last hospital board, I think Jim Service, as the chair of the board, resigned in the end because of political interference by the government at the time. There are quite a number of articles around putting in place a board and then you could not stop meddling, so the board could not do its work. In fact, I think the entire board resigned. What we have in place now is a very close, on-the-ground management system. The staff are in place; the managers in place at that hospital have my full support. That goes from the top of ACT Health, from the Chief Executive of ACT Health, right down to individual unit managers within ACT Health. Every single one of those people comes to work every day to make ACT Health work better, to make sure the people of the ACT are getting the services they need. With respect to the constant talking down of managers within ACT Health or management—and I don’t know the difference between
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