Page 182 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 14 February 2018
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our system is working. But, as we grow, demand increases and patients become more complex. This is putting pressure on our wait times.
This additional funding will enable ACT Health to achieve even more elective surgeries in this financial year. This will be accomplished by delivering more surgeries to public patients through both the public and private systems, by increasing the allocation of operating sessions to those specialities with high demand such as paediatric and adult general surgery, orthopaedic surgery, urology and gynaecological surgery.
We also will invest in one of the most significant investments this government will undertake: the surgical procedures, interventional radiology and emergency centre in the Canberra Hospital precinct, which you spoke about, Mr Assistant Speaker. I am very pleased to advise that SPIRE will be designed to completely align with our territory-wide health services planning so that care is coordinated, integrated and specialised for patients and their families and that the infrastructure to support this will be based on this framework.
SPIRE will also showcase the ACT Australia wide as the place for progressive state-of-the-art health services using new technologies as it will provide greater opportunities for research and training of our health professionals. We have already begun funding this investment and we look forward to work continuing over the coming years.
I thank Ms Cheyne very much for her motion, and I look forward to talking more and more about the wonderful health system we have, about the improvements that we are making, about the significant investment we will continue to make. Yes, Mrs Dunne is right. I am very proud of Labor’s investment in health.
MS CHEYNE (Ginninderra) (4.18), in reply: I thank all members for their contributions today, including the banging on the table. Regrettably, I will have to just take a moment to highlight Mrs Dunne’s gall in being incredibly impolite to me, when not only was she not present in the Assembly to hear my speech—I understand she had another commitment—but she clearly did not even pay me the courtesy of using her two-hour lunch break to review my 12-minute speech on Assembly on demand.
Mrs Dunne: I did not have a two-hour lunch break because I had another commitment.
MS CHEYNE: Excuse me?
Mrs Dunne: I did not have a two-hour lunch break. I had another commitment.
MS CHEYNE: I do not see why you could not have found 12 minutes or got your staff to find 12 minutes to review my speech. I find that incredibly impolite.
I had planned to refute her arguments but I struggled to follow what ended up just being really her venting her spleen, if we want to keep using health analogies. What is
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