Page 239 - Week 01 - Thursday, 15 February 2018
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services. This is important work and the government looks forward to improving the lives of people in our community who are grappling with issues of addiction, supporting them and their families.
We will remain focused on delivering new and improved facilities to hospital and community-based care. Major construction is complete on the new rehabilitation hospital at the University of Canberra. Recruitment is underway for this innovative new facility, Canberra’s first purpose-built rehabilitation hospital. It is designed to support people recovering from surgery, injury, illness or experiencing mental illness.
Planning and design is also underway for other initiatives, including the expansion of the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children, the new surgical procedures and interventional radiology and emergency centre and we are working with Calvary on how we can better deliver healthcare services to Canberra’s north side.
This year we will open Canberra’s third walk-in centre in Gungahlin, with planning underway for centres in the Weston Creek and inner north regions. We are providing more support to local GPs, with the recently opened grants round for GPs to increase bulk-billing in the Tuggeranong and Molonglo Valley regions. We are also working with Winnunga Nimmityjah to build a new health centre for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Canberrans. This will be an important facility but also a demonstration of the government’s commitment to the health and wellbeing of our local Indigenous community. I especially look forward to continuing this work with Minister Stephen-Smith and in close collaboration with Winnunga Nimmityjah.
Other innovations in the health sector this year include the national rollout of My Health Record. This is important work led by the commonwealth, which I strongly support. ACT Health and the Capital Health Network are working to support our transition to the national opt-out arrangements which come into place later this year. Canberrans can expect to see most GPs and all public hospitals actively using the My Health Record and a large number of private practices uploading patient information to the system by the end of this year. This will be a significant step in Australia’s national health system, making it more connected and leading to improved safety and better care for patients and their families in the ACT.
We know a healthy community is also supported by other important services. A number of these are also in my portfolio, in particular transport and city services. Of course, Transport Canberra and City Services deliver services right across our city every day, supporting and sustaining our community. It is a wonderful portfolio at the nexus of traditional local and state-based service delivery. It is easy to look at what TCCS does and think of the physical assets like buses, books and roads, but really their services are about people. Every day TCCS do what they can to make the lives of Canberrans easier, and we have a number of clear priorities in this area.
Just as in health, this year will see significant activity and achievement in this portfolio, building on the work we did in 2017. I would like to highlight some of my priorities for the year in transport, which include delivering stage 1 of light rail and associated major bus network upgrades and planning for stage 2 of light rail for Civic to Woden; boosting our active travel infrastructure and services, including a continued
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