Page 2607 - Week 08 - Thursday, 14 August 2014
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pleased to rise in this debate this afternoon to highlight the significant commitments being made by the ACT government across the Justice and Community Safety portfolio, including in the area of emergency services.
I will turn to the area of emergency services first, given the extraordinary diatribe we have heard from the shadow minister, Mr Smyth. The first point I would want to make is that if Mr Smyth believes that the management of the emergency services is so terrible on the part of the government, why has Mr Smyth ignored the most recent review, for example, of the Ambulance Service, commissioned by the government as a follow-up to the Lennox review that was commissioned a number of years ago, which of course was in response to criticisms of response times and management of the ACT Ambulance Service in terms of meeting response times?
Mr Smyth was very vocal then about problems identified in both the Auditor-General’s report and Mr Grant Lennox’s report into response times by the Ambulance Service. But we have not heard a word from him—not a single word from him—in relation to the follow-up review that the government commissioned to see whether or not we had fixed those problems with response times by the Ambulance Service.
Mr Smyth is very quick indeed to point the finger at me as the responsible minister when there are problems, but very slow—indeed I would say negligent—when he actually is presented with evidence that those problems have been fixed. I draw Mr Smyth’s attention to the most recent report by Mr Lennox, which the government commissioned following his extensive review of the ACT Ambulance Service in 2009 and 2010.
Let us have a bit of a recap. In 2009-10 Mr Lennox identified that escalating demand and response capacity were among a series of challenges faced by the ACT Ambulance Service, as well as problems with clinical governance, monitoring and evaluation.
The government have undertaken to implement the recommendations made by Mr Lennox as a result of his review. We have increased the number of front-line ambulances, we have increased the number of paramedics, we have increased the staffing resources in the 000 call-taking centre, we have increased clinical governance arrangements and put in place for the first time extensive and comprehensive clinical governance and improvement arrangements for the Ambulance Service.
Mr Lennox looked at all of these issues in his most recent review. He said:
I believe it is fair to say that the strong consensus in each of the various viewpoints was that substantial progress had been made in virtually every facet of the organisation and in its relationships with other key components of the emergency medical system and the health system generally.
He went on to say:
The funding injection by government has led to a revitalisation of the ACT Ambulance Service with a much improved focus on patient safety and effective clinical governance but without compromise to response performance despite continued growth in ambulance demand.
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