Page 3899 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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ex-federal Minister for Health. Every two months I wrote saying, “Please increase GP training places.”
Mrs Burke: See how you go with the new government.
MS GALLAGHER: That is right. I have said, “Please increase GP training places, please increase medical student numbers and please extend your incentive programs to the whole of the ACT, not just restrict them to particular areas.” Now, every single response I got back was no. We have eight GP training places a year in the ACT. It is not enough to deal with our ageing GP population and the numbers of GPs that we will see retire and the numbers of GPs that work part time.
Some of the reasoning around not allowing the extension of the incentive programs to GPs has come down to regions such as Civic, which has the John Curtin School of Medical Research, which has a whole load of doctors, none of whom are practising medicine on patients, and Woden, where the Canberra Hospital is. It distorts the numbers of doctors we have in those areas. We have doctors in those areas, but they are not GPs. They are not delivering a service through primary health care.
So I am hopeful. I will be raising this with the federal minister once she hits the ground and I am hopeful that we will see some movement in that area. In the absence of all of that, the division’s request to me was, “Look, how about we try this?” We will try it. This second appropriation has provided some money to do that and we will see how it goes. Even if we get one GP out of that, I think it will be a good program.
The paediatric waiting area is an area that I have been conscious of for some time, and the government has also been conscious of it. In actual fact, we established—I am not sure whether it was Minister Corbell; it may have just crossed at the time I took over—a paediatric area within the emergency department. There were paediatric beds and, with support from the paediatric staff, pediatric patients could come and watch TV and play with the toys and generally get out of the waiting area.
Again, we have seen increases in our paediatric patients. Those beds, if they are staffed, are often full, particularly over the winter months. Again, at times we see children waiting for care within the emergency department waiting room. I am not happy with that, and I think the hospital understands that. ACT Health understands that. Through this initiative we are going to provide a special waiting area which will be partitioned off, but with glass so that the triage nurses will be able to see patients. We will also staff that area with two waiting room nurses at particular times when there are a lot of children in there.
Those waiting room nurses—I think they are called clinical initiative nurses, CIN nurses—will be there to take temperatures, do observations and to be there as a resource for parents. If you are sitting there and you are worried about your child, instead of going up to the staff at the triage desk, who are often busy dealing with other patients, you will be able to have nursing care within that space. We accept that, from time to time, there are long waits for children and at times, particularly at night when there are a whole range of patients presenting to the emergency department, it can be very distressing for young children to witness some of the issues that are dealt with in a waiting room.
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