Page 180 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 14 February 2018
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and mental health services in a beautiful, purpose-built facility, to our community health centres, the hospital in the home and of course our nurse walk-in centres.
ACT Health’s focus on delivering a territory-wide health services framework will also provide the backbone of patient-centred care across the system and across all facilities in this city. Our partnership with primary healthcare providers is also vital, and we continue to work with GPs and representative organisations, and to partner and in many cases co-fund with the Capital Health Network more innovation in the primary healthcare sector. Just this week we have opened grants to improve bulk-billing rates in areas in our city we know have less access to bulk-billing GP services.
My focus on preventive health will continue and I look forward to continuing to work with our higher education and research partners and partnering with them to grow their health capacity and to employ the many highly skilled graduates our universities and CIT train, from junior doctors from the ANU, to nurses, physios and other allied health graduates from the University of Canberra, the Australian Catholic University and CIT.
In so many areas we continue to provide excellent, high quality, compassionate, patient-centred care but we must continue to improve. There are a range of ongoing reforms that, coupled with significant investment in health, are a part of continuing our improvements to our health system.
I acknowledge that there are areas where we have come from behind and where we simply must do better. And we are. On many measures, we continue to improve. For example, if you look at the improvements in median wait times at Canberra hospitals between 2012-13 and 2016-17, these wait times have reduced by one-third, from 44 to 30 minutes. This is the biggest improvement in the country over this period, and the proportion of patients seen on time, at 62 per cent in the previous financial year, has also improved. I am pleased to say the ACT has made one of the biggest improvements in the country in this area as well. This demonstrates that we are on the right track and we are doing a lot right.
I am very focused not only on continuing to make the right health investments for our community but to make sure our system performs well and continues to improve, with the aim of keeping our community as healthy as they can be.
Today I would like to build on Ms Cheyne’s motion and provide more detail and outline a number of the significant activities underway to improve the integration and redesign of services across primary health care, community-based care and the care we deliver in our hospitals, as well as our commitment to health service delivery and ensuring we have the health infrastructure we need for a growing city.
The government is taking steps to ensure that we have the right services to meet demand and population growth now and into the future. The territory-wide health services planning work is well underway and will change the way health services are delivered. ACT Health is creating new clinical centres to both coordinate and integrate patient-centred care. This will provide a continuum of care which will make
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