Page 3051 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 September 2014
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Dr Hall agreed it would help to ease the pressure, but only for a year or so.
He said any long-term improvement would require a shift in priorities …
There is the confirmation that the government has got its healthcare priorities wrong: you have got the head of the ED saying that we need a shift in priorities and we need a shift in philosophy. The article continued:
“If we don’t change anything we will simply see this cycle of brief improvements and then falling back again and people deserve better,” he said.
He is absolutely right. People do deserve better. The staff deserve better in terms of a workplace that allows them to do what they want to do, which is to help improve people’s health and their outcomes. The patients deserve better in that they should be seen more quickly; they should have fewer complications; there should be less mortality. And we know that families, who are often anxious at these times, deserve better as well. That is a key example of a government that has its priorities wrong. When you have the head of the emergency department asking for a shift in those priorities, it is about time this government listened.
You only have to look at the litany of health mismanagement. It is a sad, long history of not getting it right, of repeating the mistakes, of constantly saying, “Yes, if we spend more money things will improve.” In reality, the inputs measure is not an effective measure in this case. We absolutely know, from the terrible report from the Auditor-General on gastroenterology and the delivery of those services, that money was not the issue: it was the systems that this minister had set up, the systems this minister is responsible for, the priorities that this government got wrong.
We only need to look at the years of lost opportunities, either treading water or going backwards. We have seen poor performance. We have seen the long waits. We know that we have got the highest cost hospitals in the country, because an article in the Canberra Times on 15 September was headlined “Canberra’s public hospitals are Australia’s most expensive”.
Again, this is what happens when Labor runs a health system. We throw money at it; we constantly throw money at it. We have one single measure: “We have spent more money than anybody else.” But when you go to the measures that matter for people, outcomes and timeliness, this government fails. We know we have got the highest cost. We know we have got an unsafe working environment for the staff. Mr Hanson has spoken constantly about the pressure that is on staff. In the data doctoring scandal we know that the individual responsible felt under enormous pressure to give a political solution for a minister who was under pressure to achieve more. We know, from the motion last week, courtesy of Mrs Jones, of the physical harm that comes from an unsafe work environment for staff when they are threatened.
You only need to look at the capital works fiasco that has been the management of health. There was the new hospital tower. It was like the hospital tower hokey-pokey: it was on, it was off; it was on, it was off; it was outsourced, it was in-sourced.
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