Page 2728 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 16 September 2014
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They are busy. From my understanding, they are much busier than they expected to be. We have both walk-in centres operating. They are both busy. We have a busy Calvary public hospital and an extremely busy Canberra public hospital.
In the short term, measures are being taken to try to address the pressure. There are longer term questions which Mr Hanson went to in relation to changing the hospital to a 24-hour service. That is not easy to achieve; it sound easier than it is because it requires quite an overhaul of our current employment arrangements, including the way we manage our junior staff across the hospital, but there is an acknowledgement that we need to ramp up our after-hours service so that we are not creating pressure in the ED that has to wait overnight to be dealt with at 6 or 7 o’clock the following morning.
There is a lot of work underway. I would like to thank staff at the hospital and acknowledge that these are not bed occupancy figures that we would like to see continue for any longer than is necessary.
MADAM SPEAKER: Supplementary question, Mr Hanson.
MR HANSON: Are the current high bed occupancy rates increasing time spent in hospital, increasing costs, increasing complications and increasing mortality?
MS GALLAGHER: I have not seen any evidence of that, nor have I been advised of that. We certainly have a group of long stay patients within the hospital, and I have talked about that in this place before. We do get some quite significant discharge block, particularly with older Canberrans in their transition perhaps from the hospital back to aged care facilities or to the community.
There are a number of beds that are being used long term in the hospital, which creates additional pressure, especially when you are having more presentations coming in. Of that 226 that came in on Sunday, I think around 60 required admission into the hospital. You can see that that sort of churn is happening every day. If you have 20 or more beds tied up with patients who are spending a long time in hospital, not for medical reasons but for other reasons, that does place pressure.
But I have not seen that. I know Dr Hall reasonably well, and I know that he is well aware of the literature in relation to high bed occupancy. I am not pretending it is something that we would like to see happen, but I can assure the Canberra community that services at Canberra Hospital are high quality and safe.
MADAM SPEAKER: A supplementary question, Mr Smyth.
MR SMYTH: Minister, what consideration has been given to a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operating model for Canberra Hospital in the past, and will you now reconsider this in the light of the words from Dr Michael Hall?
MS GALLAGHER: It has certainly come up from time to time about how you increase your services out of hours. We have been doing that incrementally in particular areas. For example, one of the pressures is around imaging, so where you
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