Page 3011 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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that growth, it is a significant amount of money. It is in the hundreds of millions. When you extrapolate that over the next 10 years and when you look at what we are facing here by that structural underinvestment, it is in the billions of dollars. That is a problem for the future. It will be a problem for the Liberal Party to sort out. Right now the concern is that the government is right here and now failing to provide the services that it should for the people of the ACT.
I think the most obvious at the moment is that of elective surgery. It has had great prominence in the media, and rightly it should. We are waiting longer for elective surgery than anyone else. In actual fact, on the news tonight it showed the list. It showed that the ACT is the worst performing jurisdiction. It is twice as bad as the national average. It is 75 days for a median wait, and that has deteriorated from previous figures. It is getting worse.
The same applies for the majority of people who are waiting. It is a figure that has got worse. You now wait 158 days longer than the national average. As the minister has said previously, she is targeting long waits. What we know as well is that the figure for people waiting over a year for their elective surgery has again worsened. According to an answer to a question on notice, there are now 848 people waiting, which represents 15.46 per cent of those people who are waiting for elective surgery. That is an atrocious figure. It is a figure that is the worst in the country. It is a figure that continues to deteriorate. The question of patients being downgraded has been well canvassed in this place.
One of the concerns I have is in relation to the national health and hospital reforms that we have seen. They really are not reforms at all but are simply a change in the figures, so we give up 50 per cent of our GST and get it sent back to us through a bureaucracy. At least it is only one bureaucracy, because one of them has been taken away; it fell over, mysteriously. How are we going to achieve the benchmark targets that we have been set that, in part, our funding is dependent upon? If we cannot meet them now, how are we going to meet them going forward, and how, therefore, are we going to guarantee the performance targets that are required?
We have seen problems in cancer services, in access to screening for cervical cancer and breast cancer. We have seen some real problems with radiotherapy and people accessing that service and being sent interstate. I understand that there have been staff shortages. The problem I have is the way that people were communicated with. There seems to be a trend within ACT Health in the way in which communication is conducted between the department and patients. There is a recommendation in the dissenting report that the minister review the way the communication occurs within the department, and I strongly urge her to do so.
Moving on to capital infrastructure, this budget has $50 million that is rolled over on the back of $57 million in the previous year. Some of the projects that will be rolled over include: the bush healing farm; the car park for the Canberra Hospital—that debacle that has gone from, I think, $23 million to $45 million; the women’s and children’s hospital; the adult and mental health in-patient facility; the secure adult mental health unit—which I think Simon Corbell promised about five years ago; and the Gungahlin health centre. (Second speaking period taken.)
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