Page 2701 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 6 June 2012
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lives there. She was in touch with the cystic fibrosis clinic there and has been filled with nothing but praise for the efficiency of service, the sort of service that as a 30-year-old with a chronic life-threatening disease she has never seen before.
The service that they run in Sydney is run very frequently. She has got a very quick turnaround. I would not expect that to happen here because the number of adult patients are not here. But there is no coordination. If any one of them is sick and they need to go to hospital, there are no means by which they can be easily admitted to hospital. The last time my adult daughter was admitted to hospital as a cystic fibrosis patient she was told to turn up at accident and emergency.
She sat in accident and emergency for 15 hours. She had a chest infection and the disease in her chest infection is a disease which is chronic amongst cystic fibrosis patients. But in the middle of winter you do not want someone in accident and emergency with a very easily spreadable chest infection spreading a bacterium that most people in the community do not have and if they get it, it is very bad. It took 15 hours of her sitting in accident and emergency to be admitted to hospital because there is no other means of having people admitted. That is what is wrong with the health system.
I had some interchanges with people on my Facebook page the other day in response to the Liberal Party ad. One of the people wrote to me and said that the ad was very accurate about what is happening in the health system. She recounted the story of when her mother recently had a stroke. She was brought to hospital by ambulance and then sat—sat—in the waiting room for four hours before she saw a doctor. This woman had had a stroke.
These are the things that are wrong with the health system. This is why we say, in addition to all the statistics that Mr Hanson can bring to bear on this, that we had a good health system and it is now a bad health system. We have seen this under the Labor government over the past 11 years. We have had three health ministers in that time: Jon Stanhope, Simon Corbell and, for most of that time, Katy Gallagher.
Katy Gallagher stands here today and says, “You are being really mean to me.” It is not about her. It is about her management of the health system. She is saying that she is not responsible for the doctoring of the statistics. She is the minister, so she is responsible.
I also want to spend a little time focusing on Calvary Hospital, which is a hospital in my electorate. Mr Hanson has touched on this. We have heard the story that Katy Gallagher said at the Press Club, “All our health plans are on the table for the 2008 election.” All of their health plans were on the table except for that deal, that backdoor deal, that they were to do for the sale of Calvary. We saw this mismanaged process where the government wanted to spend in the order of $70 million or $80 million to buy an asset because they really just did not like the idea that the Little Company of Mary was running a better hospital than them.
Damage was done by that saga to Calvary Hospital and to the Little Company of Mary. The damage that was done with the connivance of the Greens was when they
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