Page 2116 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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Education Union since my appointment as education minister. It is about ensuring a significant change in culture which requires reporting of every incident. We are working through that culture change of reporting through Education so that we can make sure that we know what the problems and the issues are and so that we can work within our school communities to resolve them.
I am confident that some of the issues raised have been as a result of some complex issues within our school communities that we will get more information on as that reporting culture continues to evolve. It also points to the fact that some of these incidents are repeat incidents, not just one incident on one particular occasion.
There is a lot of information coming to the Education Directorate, which is important so that we can go some way towards making sure that the plans and policies we have developed with the Australian Education Union can be put to good use and we can resolve these issues.
Hospitals—emergency department waiting times
MRS DUNNE: My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. In 2018-19 the public health service had as a target seeing 75 per cent of urgent emergency department presentations within 30 minutes. However, the expected outcome is that only one-third of urgent patients will have been seen within the clinically appropriate time. Minister, why does the government continue to put two-thirds of urgent presentations in the emergency department at risk of serious health outcomes by their not being seen within the clinically approved times?
MS FITZHARRIS: It does not. Across both public hospitals there are very busy emergency departments. I note that we are now facing a flu season slightly earlier than we might normally face it. It is the case that, as I have stated publicly on many occasions, part of our challenge is in managing growing presentations. What we are seeing, in addition to increased presentations to both our emergency departments, are investments from the government, significantly expanding the Calvary emergency department and expanding and upgrading the Canberra Hospital emergency department, as well as providing additional staffing resources—nurses and doctors—for both emergency departments.
As the opposition is aware, the new CEO of Canberra Health Services, almost immediately upon her commencement in the role, implemented a timely care strategy which is looking at patient flows throughout the whole of Canberra Hospital. That work continues with a whole of organisation effort. The effort is in making sure that there can be good patient flows across the hospital.
It is certainly the case that, with increasing presentations, the category 3 patients are the lowest performing category. Much effort is being made to improve that. I would note that there has been a significant decrease in our category 4 and 5 presentations to the hospitals. That means people with more minor illnesses and ailments are going to alternative service providers. That may be their GP, but we are seeing increasing presentations to our nurse walk-in centres, which the opposition do not like. We will continue to work very much on providing timely care to patients throughout our public health system and in particular in our busy emergency departments.
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