Page 2729 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 16 September 2014
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are in the emergency department and you might need some imaging done. We are looking at how we change the arrangements for how we run that service now, and that goes to this point.
A large-scale overhaul to run any hospital 24 hours a day will have significant costs and will require significant industrial relations change. I am not aware of any hospital anywhere that has been able to do that. I think we will need to do it incrementally, so we will have to start ramping up services. We have been doing that with the way we have been rostering junior doctors, for example, through the hospital and the work that is being done there.
So it is happening, but it will have to happen in stages. You are never going to have working at 2 am the same level of staff that you have got working at 2 pm or at the peak times when we have two shifts come in at once and you have double the number of staff there. Certainly, we are going to need more than we have at the moment as we continue to roll out the enhanced health services we have been doing for the last six years or so under the health infrastructure program. It will change, but it will have to change in time. I can assure you that the IR issues alone are not insignificant, or the cost involved.
MADAM SPEAKER: A supplementary question, Mr Smyth.
MR SMYTH: Minister, what solutions do you have for making the Canberra Hospital safe, given Dr Hall’s warnings that the current situation increases time in hospital, increases cost, increases complications and in fact increases mortality?
MS GALLAGHER: We have a number of initiatives. One of them is the health infrastructure program which now receives funding in the order of $877 million to grow the health infrastructure we need. Some of the pressure is coming from the availability of beds. We have about 40 additional beds opening this year in a combination between Calvary and Canberra. We have also added capacity in the emergency department.
There is a huge amount of work going on. In every budget we have initiatives. This is the largest part of the budget and always has a larger share of budget initiatives. Almost every single one of those initiatives goes to improving the efficiency and safety of the hospital and supporting particularly the work that the emergency department has been doing to ensure that patients are getting seen as quickly as possible.
But Dr Hall is right, in the sense that he focuses the debate very squarely at a whole-of-hospital solution and not just the emergency department. Whilst it is very easy to point the finger at the emergency department and say, “You are not seeing people quickly enough,” it is much harder to encourage other parts of the hospital to support the work the emergency department does and take patients quickly from that area. We have had cases where people have had an extended wait in the ED, waiting for their admission process in the ward. It is areas like that where we really need to ensure the reform happens, and I certainly support the work that Dr Hall has been doing in advocating that across the hospital.
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