Page 1657 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 13 May 2015
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This is another important point, because this is something that Mr Corbell was trying to spin at me yesterday. There was an answer given in 2013 about that, and what we were told was that it was going to have the capacity to take up to 200 beds. That was very important; that was the work it was going to do. Then the government said that they were going to open 166 beds in the year 2017-18.
That sounded reasonable because, a bit like the jail, you want to have it built with the capacity to cope with the extra demand that is going to come in the short to medium and long terms, but you are not going to open all those beds on day one. That is realistic, just like the jail. We would have expected that if it had opened with 374 beds they would not have had that many prisoners. But we knew there would be growth, and that is why they build it with the capacity.
Just as here, what the government told us was that they were going to build it with a capacity for 200, but in the 2017-18 period, which is when the hospital opens, 166 beds were going to be opened straightaway, because that was the anticipated demand at that stage. But it had capacity for growth by 2019, by 2020, by 2021, by 2022. What we do know is that demand is actually outstripping what was anticipated. We know that there were demographic studies completed, and it is always difficult to quite anticipate where the growth is.
But if you do not plan for growth that is at the top end, then what happens is that you end up exactly where we were with the jail. Ms Gallagher seemed to know this, because she put out—and I showed this one yesterday—the government newsletter. It is a lovely document. It is very pretty. It almost looks like it is just advertising material. But my understanding is that it is here to inform the community. It said, next to a message from the Chief Minister—and this was mid-2013—under the heading “Expanding health and hospital services in the ACT”:
The new University of Canberra Public Hospital will provide 200 beds for sub-acute services in a purpose-built … facility.
We are going to get spin. We are going to get denials. We are going to get, “Look at this figure; look at that figure,” to try and cover their tracks. But the grim reality is that we need to build on the north side of Canberra a hospital that has got capacity.
Mr Rattenbury, who hopefully will support this motion, is someone that should understand this. He has inherited this problem with the jail. He is living the consequence of poor planning. He is living the consequence of a government that stripped beds from what was originally designed, what was originally proposed, to meet demand. And history is repeating itself. So I implore Mr Rattenbury, through you, Madam Speaker, to learn from history and make sure that these mistakes are not repeated because, if they are, the ultimate pain will be paid by patients in the ACT who will continue to experience bed-block, who will not get treated in emergency quickly enough. As we know from a question asked of Mr Corbell yesterday, there is a direct impact on the number of subacute beds and how many beds can be freed up in the acute system.
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