Page 1918 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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GP numbers remain a significant cause for concern, with the ACT continuing to experience one of the worst shortages in the nation. We require about 140 doctors or GPs to achieve parity with the rest of the nation.
In terms of bulk-billing, the ACT continues to be well behind the rest of the nation on a number of services. The latest comparable data shows that only 51.1 per cent of services were bulk-billed, compared with an Australian average of 79.2 per cent. So addressing this should be a priority at all levels of government. But we see nothing in this budget to address that.
The number of hospital beds per 1,000 is 2.5. This is the lowest in the nation and in fact does not take account of the nearly 30 per cent of use that comes from New South Wales; so the stats are probably actually worse than presented. We also have the lowest number of public dentists per capita.
So I am putting the context of where this budget was delivered and I am very dismayed to be standing here saying all of this. I recall being in the same place last year and challenging the government to improve on those figures. But we have seen very little in terms of upward movement, in terms of improving people’s access to our hospital system. So instead of congratulating the government, I find myself almost repeating those same criticisms.
The minister in her speech so explicitly said that this is a budget that is responding to the health needs of Canberrans now and not the future. So she has admitted that that is the case. This is a budget that is not aimed at the future, that has no vision in it. It is not going to make the changes that we need in our health system to adapt to an ageing and growing population.
We certainly recognise the funding that is in the budget for an additional 800 elective surgery procedures, and it is absolutely necessary to have that. And it is an acknowledgement from the government that there is a particular need, and this is a particular need where we actually require attention. We do hope to see more detail, however, on how the government will deliver the level of surgery that is required in these high-demand areas, particularly for specialties experiencing very long delays and capacity issues such as urology, orthopaedics, general surgery and neurosurgery. So I will be looking very closely at those capacity issues and seeing how the government is going to address the staffing shortfalls.
Although there is a lot of promise and there is money in the budget, it will mean nothing if the government cannot actually deliver. And what we do see from this government in terms of elective surgery and in terms of emergency departments, despite the amount of money that they throw at our health system—and we know that we are spending more per capita than anywhere else in Australia other than the Northern Territory—is that they simply do not have the ability to get the job done.
The extra funding for cancer services outlined in the budget is well overdue and this is an area which we know has been experiencing significant pressures in recent years. I think we all remember the case of the cancer patient just recently who had the very
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