Page 3064 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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Mr Hanson interjecting—
MS GALLAGHER: I signed it off as a question on notice. It came as an attachment, and it is called the capital costing document for the 400 beds. It is also on the ACT Health website. And that does go through the bed numbers. I think the issue in the recommendation of the estimates report is that, and it is true, the 400 beds were an indicative figure for the purposes of determining the most appropriate way to provide for those 400 beds. What we are trying to say is that there will be additional beds on top of those 400. The 400 was used to examine the different options as an estimate of the bed requirements; it does not include the fact that we will have to grow beds at the Canberra Hospital as well.
As we progress that work, it will be refined year by year as changes are made. All it takes, for example, is a change in a certain cancer treatment, and we have seen it in the last couple of years, which significantly affects the demand for a particular type of cancer treatment or the way that treatment is administered, which will have an effect on your bed numbers. So the bed numbers will change. We know we need more, and we know that they will be in excess of 400, but over the 10-year rebuild of the hospital system, as we progress some of that work—indeed, the work we have agreed to do with LCM Health Care over the next six to 12 months—we will refine that even further. They have made some changes to their private hospital which will enable us to potentially open public hospital beds in the existing space of the Cavalry Public Hospital, or the Calvary hospital area, which will have an impact on the capital numbers as well.
I think it is fair to say that these numbers will change a little as that work is refined, but in terms of the costings I was very happy to release those costings. I did not release them at the time, and I have gone to this in the past. With the approach of the consultants by the Little Company of Mary Health Care and the view, I think, that they were trying to protect their ability to provide acute beds on the north side of Canberra, they took a particular view around the discussion paper the government put out. But that is in the past.
LCM Health Care and the government are working closely now to deliver a truly role-delineated and integrated health system for the ACT. I remain hopeful that we will be able to achieve this. It will come down to some pretty difficult discussions about what gets done, where it gets done and when it gets done, but I think there are some easy and quick areas where we can carve off some work that will deliver more integration than we have had in the past.
The $4 million in this budget will go to developing some of those options about where a subacute hospital should be, how it should interrelate with the acute system, and exactly what bed numbers are required and where they are placed. There are obviously a couple of locations that spring to mind. There is the University of Canberra as a potential option; there is also looking at and examining the capacity on the Little Company of Mary Health Care’s lease or Calvary Health Care’s lease on the Bruce site. The Bruce site is slightly constrained by some of the significant trees that they have on that site, and that may impact on the capacity to use the available land for new buildings.
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