Page 2179 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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This is an exciting budget for health. I spoke to over 100 people today in the auditorium at TCH. There is enormous excitement about this plan. There is enormous buy-in for the plan. This plan has been developed over the past year by the doctors, allied health workers and nurses. Ten workshops were held. This is their wish list of what they need to deliver good quality public health care into the future. I think they are heartened by the $300 million dollar commitment that we have made to kick this project off.
I note Mrs Dunne’s concern about the provision of clinical services, redevelopment and project definition planning. It is a bit part of the first $300 million, but when seen in the context of the overall 10-year plan—and that is the money for those elements of the entire 10-year plan—it does fit, I think, into a more reasonable allocation of the bigger project. I accept that it looks like a very large element of the first $300 million, but we have to do the clinical services redevelopment right. We have to get the project definition planning right up front, and that is around the staging, decanting and moving people around the hospital. It is around running a hospital.
Mrs Burke: The buzz word of the week.
MS GALLAGHER: “Decanting” is the word they use. It is not a buzz word. It is just the word that is used when you are moving and changing the configuration of a hospital.
Mrs Burke: I did not know that.
MS GALLAGHER: Well, you do not know a lot of things, Mrs Burke, but we do not have to spend time worrying about what you do not know. Perhaps if you did not interject with stupid interjections, we would not have to respond to them. I know I should not. I have almost made it without doing it.
The clinical service redevelopment is important. That is to start moving those early stages of the project forward in a timely fashion. That is about bringing forward the work in the new emergency department. It is about getting those early stages of the project moving along in a timely fashion that will allow us to deliver this project over the next eight to 10 years.
So, yes, it looks like a big lot of that first money, but it is vitally important. Many of the doctors that I have spoken to since the budget was announced have been very keen on having their say about how that is allocated to make sure that they can still deliver the services they need to deliver while working in a large construction site.
This is the single biggest investment any government has made in the public hospital system. It is the biggest plan anyone has had around a vision for how to tackle the challenges of the health system. It is not just about infrastructure. It is about recurrent expenditure that supports that. It is about e-health; it is about e-technology, as Mrs Dunne alluded to. There will be an e-revolution in health in the next 10 years. We need to build a system that is able to cope with that and respond to new and emerging technologies, including a new worker in the health system—a technical e-health worker—who will be a very important part of any multidisciplinary team.
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