Page 1086 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 30 March 2011
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Ms Gallagher: the information that you provide to the community—
Mr Hanson interjecting—
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Mr Hanson, please be quiet. Ms Gallagher, please continue.
MS GALLAGHER: My amendment seeks to provide a balance and a context to the report. It seeks to explain and acknowledge that medium waiting times have increased. It acknowledges that there are areas for improvement. But it also says that 2,000 more presentations have come to the emergency department in the first six months. It also acknowledges that we are removing long waits from the list. If you are removing long waits from the list, your medium waiting time is going to get worse. That does not mean that less people are getting access to your health services. It means your removals from the list have been for patients who have been waiting for care longer than they should have. That does not mean access has not improved. Not one of the comments in my foreword is incorrect. The report provides all of that information to the community.
I drew the attention of the community to the report’s release. It is placed on the website so that people know that it is there and can have a look at it and see all of this information. I am not sure we have got all of the performance indicators right in here. I think there is probably more that we should report against. Indeed, this is the first time that we have included data around the walk-in centre. But I think we need to have information in there around emergency surgery. One emergency surgery can take up two theatres for 10 to 14 hours.
When you are looking at increases in emergency surgery by 13 per cent, as we have seen, is there any surprise that there is pressure on the elective list? This is why the decisions about what we do about our future health services are so important. We need to free Canberra Hospital up to be the emergency trauma centre for the region. I do not believe that Canberra Hospital should do much, if any, elective work in the future under a health system that we build. I believe that we need to take that out of its responsibilities because the emergency work is so great. That is why some of the decisions about the future of the health system are so important.
This report also notes the extra beds that have come on. It has taken us, I accept, a number of years to replace the 114 beds that Mr Smyth’s government removed from the system.
Mr Smyth: It is not true. You cannot mislead the Assembly.
MS GALLAGHER: I have tabled it in here. I have tabled it in here. I have not misled the Assembly.
Mr Smyth: You show which budget we pulled them from.
MS GALLAGHER: I have tabled the bed data—
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