Page 945 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
situation—this breakdown in communication—was occurring. Cancer sufferers not only could not go to receive their treatment in Canberra but were not being advised of that when they tried to seek information. The information was not forthcoming.
I am calling on the minister to clarify a few things today. I want her to explain, in detail, the cause of the communication breakdown that occurred within ACT Health and between ACT Health officials and patients suffering from cancer. I am calling on her to explain what action she has taken to ensure that those breakdowns in communication have been resolved and will not occur again. I am calling on the minister to explain why at least six radio-oncology staff resigned at short notice. And I am calling on the minister to clarify when all patients suffering from cancer in the ACT will be treated in the ACT.
I am not sure we are going to get those answers today. I would hope so. But we have not seen a great deal of sympathy or empathy coming out of the minister or certainly from Mr Stanhope in recent days. There was great debate in this place during question time about the attitude from Mr Stanhope, about these “stop whingeing” comments. There are some semantics around whether he was actually referring to other people but if you listen to that debate in context, if you listen to what was said, quite clearly he was sending the message, as the Chief Minister, to the people of Canberra, people who are waiting for elective surgery or in emergency departments, “If you are waiting for treatment, you are going to get good treatment in the end; so you can just stop whingeing.” He actually said about the waiting:
At the end of the day, these are perhaps the least relevant of all the indicators of the way that our health system’s operating.
We know that the evidence is that actually waiting for cancer treatment is not a trivial matter. It can have a negative effect on that treatment. He discarded waiting times as unimportant. You think about young Nathan whom we heard about yesterday and about the AMA’s comment about the delays, the wait. They can have serious implications on people’s health. To discard that and say, “Oh, well, people should not whinge about waiting,” or certainly intimate that, as he did, is disgraceful. It shows a complete disregard for people’s conditions and the suffering that they are experiencing, the stress and anxiety in waiting for treatment and, in this case, cancer treatments. He said:
The vast majority of Canberrans’ experience of the care they received in our public hospitals is overwhelmingly positive.
Ask the mothers and the babies who were exposed to TB, minister. Ask the parents who received the bill for TB testing after the baby died. Ask Vesna Nedic; ask the obstetricians who are bullied; ask the mother who was advised to abort a healthy baby; ask the woman who miscarried in the emergency department toilet five days after staff assured her she had already lost a baby; go and ask the mothers and fathers waiting in the emergency department; go and speak to the people in pain waiting on elective surgery lists; go and ask young Lachlan or his mother; go and ask people who cannot find a GP. Go and ask them if they are happy with the way the health system is operating and see what sort of answer you get. See if they should be saying to you, “Oh, sorry, we will stop whingeing.”
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video