Page 2679 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 10 August 2016
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So the support that we have received is not just from the AMA—and I will go to some of the comments there later—and not just from patients, not just from nurses. This is the nurses union that have come out saying, “Well done; this is a good policy.” They make the point. They are not making a judgement on whether it is Liberal or Labor. They are saying they will support good policy. Good on them for doing that. There is a natural inclination of some unions, I would have to say, to blindly back the Labor Party no matter what the evidence. I commend the nurses union for putting their members first. That is what they have done here. They have said, “We are not going to make a judgement on whether this is Liberal or Labor. We make a judgement on whether this is good policy or not.” I commend the secretary of the ANMF and the staff there for that decision.
There is a long litany of problems with our health system leading up to this point; I have spoken about those at length in this place before. But I must say I was shocked at estimates this year when I was asking questions of the minister and his bureaucrats and it came out that the plan was to manage extreme and high-risk infrastructure. Basically we are band-aiding the health system, managing extreme and high-risk infrastructure. That is a hell of a way to manage a health system, isn’t it?
If the budget was in such a position that it was the only thing that could be done, and if the government said, “Look, we have a will. We want to do something more but we have not got the money,” that would be one thing. But the fact that they have this largesse with the tram, the billions of dollars that they are prepared to spend on the tram, is what is really causing grief in our community. They are going to band-aid the health system, managing high-risk, extreme risk infrastructure, while they spend money on the tram.
Some of the work that has been done recently has been described by Mr Corbell as temporary and short term. Temporary and short term? That is not the way to manage a health system. That is what we see as the errors that have been made by this government in managing infrastructure for far too long.
Dr Hall, who runs the ED, when this temporary solution was put forward, said, “It involved a significant compromise.” Is this how we run health in this town? A significant compromise? Is that the way we do it under Labor now? The previous project director described it as unconscionable that they had withdrawn this funding.
The statistics are well known. The statistics are well known in terms of demand and how we are meeting that demand across the board for elective surgery, for emergency department treatment. And it does not just go to timeliness. We have talked about that before. It also goes to the quality of the provision of the services and what overcrowding means with regard to patient safety. Once you get to a certain point in a hospital, 85 or 95 per cent, doctors will tell you that it is unsafe. It is not a safe place to be when you get that high.
There is a concern about the number of beds we have. There is no question about that. Statistics get thrown around and so on. One of the problems that we really have here is the fact that many of our overnight beds are occupied by New South Wales
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