Page 1919 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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traumatic experience of having to go to Sydney, and the many others who are in the same situation as she is.
When you look at the new spending initiatives, what you will see is that it is not born out of vision or an attempt to get ahead of the capacity issues that we are experiencing but is simply out of necessity. It is a reactive rather than a proactive approach. It is simply a matter of keeping pace with demand rather than any change, structurally or systemically, to make the changes that we need in our health system.
I note that there has been a review of outputs across the budget and over $13 million has been transferred into early intervention and prevention from other areas. So there is a bit of movement around, but I think it is quite clear, when you look at the actual money that has been allocated in mental health services, in public health services, there is just no explanation of why it has been transferred. But it is certainly an inadequate amount, when you look at the outputs in the community that have a focus on prevention, on detection and early intervention as opposed to simply pouring more money in the acute end of the spectrum.
We have got to be able to do both. We have got to make sure that we are not simply neglecting the prevention, early intervention and detection; otherwise we will find that, budget after budget after budget, all we are going to be able to do is have to keep pouring more money time and again into the acute end.
There is no money for GPs in this budget. There is nothing there for probably one of the most critical areas in our community. So despite the fact that this government has had an Assembly inquiry that reported and had its own task force inquiry, we see nothing in response from this government to put additional money into the budget for GPs. And I think that is a great concern to the primary health community and it would be a great concern to the patients who are desperately trying to access a GP in the ACT.
On the issue of the national health and hospital reform, it is still unclear, I think, to many people how that is actually going to play out and how that funding mix is going to occur in the ACT, what the true impacts of that are, how the case-mix funding will be delivered, how it will be calculated, what the penalties will be if we do not actually meet our targets for elective surgery and our emergency departments. A lot of that is unclear, and the minister is at a loss to explain that.
She is also at a loss to explain quite what will happen with our regional hospital network. Will Queanbeyan, Cooma and Yass be included in that or not? The Prime Minister said that they were going to be and that is the way it was going to work, but Katy Gallagher on the radio then said, “No, we are a way off that actually occurring.” So it is very difficult to know whether there is a need for that to occur or not.
If you recall, this was signed off before any due diligence was done on the impact of taking those hospitals and what it would actually mean for the ACT. So Jon Stanhope went into that agreement without having done any review, any due diligence to make sure that those hospitals would not have a significant negative impact if we took them as a region.
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