Page 466 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 23 February 2010
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As you see, there are quite a number of recommendations—24 in total. I was concerned on a number of levels about a number of these recommendations, and I of course raised those in private meetings of the committee. As the minutes of the committee cannot give a blow-by-blow account of the committee's deliberation, I want to put on the record my concern about the appropriateness of some of the recommendations.
This is not to say that I believe that a separate report was warranted given that, as I said, I was not able to examine and further question witnesses whose statements are contained in the report, nor did I fully understand the entire context of some of the conclusions that the committee had come to. However, I did seek to understand and clarify the content and context during deliberations over the report. I asked for clarification on a number of matters, as well as requesting further information to be provided and some changes in text to be made. Some of this information was provided and now forms part of the body of the report, and some of the recommendations have been slightly changed because of my discomfort with them. However, there remains in the report some recommendations I have reservations about and which I have been unsuccessful in having modified.
I am not aware that they create particular difficulties, except to say that one is always conscious that, in the area of general practice in particular, the federal government has jurisdiction. Another concern is, of course, resources. We should always remain aware that, when we ask for work to be done, these requests could mean that resources need to be redirected away from critical demands in health if the committee’s wish list were to be fulfilled. As the committee believes, particularly the chair—and he expressed this—that my concerns and questions when I raised them were largely wasting the committee’s time, I will now use the Assembly’s time to reiterate my concerns.
On page 3 of the report under the heading “GP task force”, paragraph 1.10, the report uses the word “following”. I wished the word “following” to be removed and replaced with the words “concurrent with”, as it is my reading of the situation that it is a more accurate interpretation of events. The word “following” gives the reader the impression either that the government was not aware of the concerns regarding previous events involving general practitioners in the ACT or that the government simply reacted to the Assembly’s referral by immediately setting up a task force.
As the announcement of the task force was accompanied by the information about its membership, which we all know takes a good deal of time to organise, it is obvious that this was not formed in response to the referral. To give the impression that the government was unaware and was sitting on its hands doing nothing is misleading. By simply reading the body of the report, it is quite obvious that the government was aware and has been working rigorously with stakeholders to address the matters that are under examination. Of course, the government can only do what it has the power to do, and I would like, once again, to remind the Assembly of the federal government’s responsibility in respect of health policy.
Recommendation 1 is that the government work with the ACT Division of General Practice to develop ways of raising the profile of general practitioners in the
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