Page 3122 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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These targeted investments have transformed our health system and enabled us to deliver new, exciting and innovative services—services that have never been provided in Canberra.
Running alongside this is the public health policy work: some of the toughest tobacco control measures around; food safety laws that are giving Canberrans greater confidence when they eat out; a major review of the mental health act; and new strategies to deal with some of our most challenging health issues—chronic disease, renal services and diabetes.
Every one of these reforms and every one of these services is fair game for the Liberals, with their simplistic cherry-picking of the facts and their sweeping statements of condemnation. I do wonder, if the Liberals were banned from talking about ED waiting times or median wait times in elective surgery, whether they would have anything at all to say about the health system—an interesting test perhaps for the fourth estate.
Mr Speaker, Canberrans have much to be proud of in their health system—its doctors and its nurses, its allied health professionals and its facilities. I am not standing here and saying the health system is perfect. No health system anywhere in the world is. Health systems are human systems. There is always room for improvement and there are always areas of pressure. But the health system is complex. It is like a puzzle where all the pieces are interrelated and depend on each other to build the complete picture. If you look at any health system you will find areas where they do well and areas where they do not. And that is a fact.
I agree with the Auditor-General’s observation that there is a lack of focus on qualitative indicators in assessing emergency department performance. As I have previously informed the Assembly, I have been raising this issue at the national level and urging my interstate colleagues to work with me to create a new set of performance measures which focus on patient outcomes and fairly treat small jurisdictions with limited hospitals in a similar way to the larger jurisdictions.
A good start would be to be able to reach agreement on how to manage waiting lists in elective surgery to allow for consistency and agreement on what starts the clock in the emergency department. Timeliness is one way of measuring the health system but it is not the only way and it should be seen in the context of the outcomes delivered. And those outcomes for Canberrans are excellent—low rates of hospital acquired infections, low readmission rates, the lowest levels of intervention during birth for first-time mothers, and excellent cancer survival rates.
This is the system that the Liberals trash and talk down. And we all know why they talk everything down. It is because they have nothing of their own to talk up. Let us look at the Liberal Party’s health policies for an election which is a little over two months away. They have only one, and that is to close the nurse-led walk-in centre, a facility that has provided a nation-leading model of care to more than 34,000 Canberrans who have presented at the clinic since it opened.
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