Page 3344 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
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Council on Healthcare Standards has run its accreditation process. Then let us look at it because we will have some more up-to-date and hard data.
At the moment I would say, though, that there are not too many people in this room that could not identify where the problems are in our health system. We hear it over and over again. We know that there are long waiting lists and that emergency rooms fill up. We know there is a shortage of doctors and that doctors are working in those emergency sectors of the hospital for unsustainable lengths of time. There are real issues. They are probably not unique to the ACT system, though, and that is why I would go further and ask why we are not calling for a national inquiry.
In the run-up to this election we have had various pretenders to the throne of Prime Minister and health minister make all kinds of pronouncements on health. But those pronouncements are not part of a national strategy. They do not contain any sense of governance of the health system. The latest is boards; let us have boards. Boards may be a good idea. We used to have them but now we do not. Why don’t we? There must be a reason.
The potential for those boards to become politicised is a concern. It should be a huge concern to our community because health is already a political football. We do not want to politicise it further. We certainly want practitioners and consumers involved in decisions that are made about our health services, but I do not think we want political appointments so that our hospitals, even at the level of clinical care, become politicised. At the moment I would say that at that level where care takes place people are just concerned about giving that care in the best way they can with the resources they have.
We know that hospitals need more resources. That is a huge issue, and I think we should be looking at the federal and state and territory interface in terms of health. It is just too convenient for the Liberals at the national level to blame the states because they are all Labor governments. It just becomes part of that political football where you blame the states; it is easy. I wonder if it would be any different if they were Liberal governments. Would the federal Liberal coalition be acting in the way it is? That is a hypothetical. We do not know because that is not the situation. My research indicates that these problems are not party political problems. They are problems between different levels of government and they existed even when there were Liberal coalition governments all over Australia. That was a short moment, of course, but there was that moment.
I think we do know that there is consensus across all parties, in the ACT and elsewhere, that we need more general practitioners. We probably have shortages of some kinds of medical specialists and that is always going to be a problem. We are now in the global competitive rush to find these people. This is not just a territory problem or a national problem. It is a global problem. It is part of the globalisation of health issues, which has been a deliberate policy by some governments to open up our health system to so-called competitive procedures. It means that we are now not in a system where we are playing on a level playing field. We have to try and attract doctors from elsewhere, and increasingly we are robbing developing countries of their doctors. I actually think they need them more.
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