Page 3054 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 September 2014
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MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ms Lawder): Thank you, Mr Rattenbury. The level of noise is a bit too high. I would like to listen to Ms Gallagher.
MS GALLAGHER: Thank you. Let us go back through the history of beds, which gets forgotten, particularly by Mr Smyth, who was in government at the time. In 2001, when we came to office, the ACT did not even reach the national average of beds per population, because beds had been closed and beds had been reduced. We came to office and there were 670 acute beds in the system in 2002. There are now 1,048, a 56 per cent increase in bed availability in this jurisdiction. I would say it took about seven or eight years to get back to the point of where we should be, which is where we are now, with 2.5 beds per 1,000 population, which is right on the national average. And that has been with us opening the maximum number of beds that we could staff in any given year. In every single year we have increased bed numbers to deal with the legacy that we were left by the last conservative government, which shut beds—
Mr Smyth: No, we didn’t.
MS GALLAGHER: You did shut beds. I have tabled the documents in this place that clearly show that under the last administration beds were shut in the ACT health system, to do with the Canberra Hospital closure. The amalgamation, or the expansion, at Canberra Hospital and Calvary went nowhere to compensate for the beds that were lost with the closing of the third hospital.
In terms of where those beds have gone and where the new beds will go, this is an area that continues to require a lot of focus from government, and indeed from the broader health system. There will be further bed expansions at Calvary hospital, including intensive care beds. There will be extra psycho-geriatric beds, extra beds in the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children, extra inpatient beds at Canberra Hospital, an additional six ICU beds at Canberra Hospital, eight medi-hotel beds at Canberra Hospital and additional mental health unit beds at Canberra Hospital. Also, the building of the secure mental health facility will provide an additional 15 beds. That facility will undergo demolition and early works towards the end of this year, with construction proper to start in the first quarter of next year.
The issue there, I think, is going to be one of workforce. We do not have a workforce that provides the care for a secure mental health facility in an inpatient setting. It is going to require a lot of work to go in and actually secure a workforce for that facility. We can build the facility—that will be straightforward—but the actual staffing of it is going to be a real challenge when that comes online. There has been an enormous amount of work to establish the healthcare priorities during my term as health minister and, prior to my term, through Minister Corbell.
Talk about health systems in crisis. When we came to office we found that we had nurses on strike from their attack on the Industrial Relations Commission. That is not something that we have seen in our years in government. We had a severely under-resourced health system, a severely under-resourced level of service that we have been building up each year. More people had to travel to Sydney and seek treatment because the Liberal government, when they were in power, simply did not prioritise
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