Page 639 - Week 02 - Thursday, 22 February 2018
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technology and innovative therapy spaces. The hospital is on track to open in mid-2018 and we very much look forward to welcoming many Canberrans through its doors.
It is clear that there is really only one side of this chamber that is committed to investing in the health infrastructure and services that our city needs. Just some of the new initiatives in this year’s budget include new walk-in centres for Gungahlin, on which I look forward to turning the sod tomorrow, and upgrades to the acute aged-care ward at Canberra Hospital, which I had the pleasure of visiting earlier this year. It is a wonderful new space co-designed by practitioners with community organisations, patients and their families—a wonderful example of the terrific work that ACT Health is doing to upgrade existing facilities. Work is now underway on the oncology ward at Canberra Hospital. Both of these together will deliver even better patient care. We have work well underway for the planning and scoping of the major surgical procedures, interventional radiology and emergency centre at Canberra Hospital, a major investment in our future health needs.
We are expanding the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children, which includes not only expanding existing beds but providing new services. Indeed, it is expanding to meet growing demand, but it is also providing new services—importantly, an inpatient child and adolescent mental health unit. That is a new initiative that is included in the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children and is something that the government is rightly proud of making an investment in.
We continue to plan for the expansion of further health needs on the north side of Canberra, and we are very pleased to be working with Winnunga Nimmityjah to build a new health centre for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Canberrans. We are delivering on our commitments, and I have been very proud to see great improvements and changes within ACT Health over the past 18 months.
On the issue of waiting times in both elective surgery and emergency departments, it is clear that we are making improvements but we need to do better. We have a unique mix of hospitals here in the ACT that were certainly represented in the recent ROGS report. We have seen a significant increase in demand over the past 12 months.
The ED has implemented a number of strategies in the past two years to improve patient flow, with an expanded department with new staff. Further work is also being done to improve the median wait times, which over the last few years have reduced by one-third, from 44 to 30 minutes, the largest improvement in the country in our emergency departments.
We have diversion strategies in place to reduce non-urgent presentations to our EDs, which is showing that the government’s focus on providing the right care in the right settings is starting to work. We also recently invested, through the midyear budget review, in additional elective surgery so that we can bring down waiting times for elective surgery—including all surgeries but especially elective surgery—investing an additional $6.4 million to help patients access treatment within the recommended time frames. This will help ACT Health to achieve over 13,000 elective surgery procedures. Getting on top of our waiting lists is a priority.
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