Page 3662 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 21 November 2007
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What is of concern to me, as we have raised before, is the management of the services. The government is letting down our workforce. When it is not getting management right and it is putting staff, doctors and nurses, under pressure, what is the end result of that? People are coming into the emergency department and waiting for eight hours or longer; people are waiting for 12 months for elective surgery; people are not getting good, optimum outcomes for face and jaw surgery. It is such a pity that the dedication and loyalty of nurses, doctors and other health officials and professionals are not rewarded by the government; instead they are left under a cloud of doubt or, worse still, the government uses them as a smokescreen for its own incompetence.
I had a good chat for about an hour to someone who was recently a patient at the Canberra Hospital. This might help the minister; she can use this. She said to me, “It’s like a jigsaw and all the parts don’t fit properly together.” What does that say to you? That smacks of a system that is disparate; it is not fully cohesive. Things are not working like the well-oiled machinery that we keep hearing about from those opposite. It just is not happening. People are experiencing less than optimal service. Dr Rosanna Capolingua, President of the AMA, said recently:
… what is happening is that we have seen a deterioration over time … There has been a philosophy of cutting back and constraining, of trying to hold back costs, when the demand has been increasing.
We have heard the minister say that there is an increase in the number of patients. We do not quite get the full spread regarding where all the money is going and how much is going into admin. The minister might be able to give us a bit of a breakdown of this whole money issue—where money is currently being directed in our public hospitals. Dr Capolingua continued:
So that creates a huge inequity. It has the nursing staff and medical staff, the doctors there who have been holding things together, trying to look after patients but the pressure on them is enormous and they feel they have been compromised in their care.
So despite Ms Gallagher’s wailing protestations, people who talk to me, write to me and telephone me—and I pass those comments on to the health minister—including doctors, nurses and others who contact me, do not feel supported because the current health minister lacks the required leadership. It is plain and simple. It is not me saying it; this is the community telling me that the health minister is not up to the job. We are not seeing what we could be seeing. Nobody can build their political career on fixing public hospitals. I am not espousing that. But I am saying we can do a darned sight better than we are doing at the moment and that this health minister is doing at the moment.
As I said earlier, we have heard the Reba Meagher defence. It is starting to look here pretty much like what is going on at Royal North Shore, but they have refused to hold an inquiry to get to the bottom of some of these serious issues. The public hospital system in the ACT desperately needs intense scrutiny and evaluation, not only to correct the many inefficiencies that are coming to light, but also to ensure that the taxpayers of Canberra receive value for money and that the dedicated staff who are working there are given every possible support.
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