Page 2736 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 13 August 2019
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As I have said, one person in the ACT government is assigned to a project that is supposedly the top priority for both ACT Health and the entire government. This government thinks it is more important to have media advisers and public relations officers in ACT Health and ACT Health Services than it is to have a competent team putting together this most important infrastructure project. There is, comparatively speaking, an army of media advisers and public relations people across ACT Health. Some of the three dozen people working there could be perhaps better allocated to working on ensuring that SPIRE is built on time and on budget, or perhaps ahead of time, given that the timetable has already blown out.
The second major event that has taken place since the ACT budget was handed down is the resignation of Minister Fitzharris. On 27 June she announced that she would be resigning from the ministry and leaving the Assembly on 1 July. Minister Fitzharris had responsibility for Health and for Transport and City Services. Together, these portfolios represented 44 per cent of the ACT budget. In addition, Ms Fitzharris was responsible for two of the biggest capital works projects in the history of self-government: light rail and SPIRE. It was a huge workload, and it was clear to me and others that Ms Fitzharris was not across her portfolios. When Minister Steel became the Minister for City Services, that relieved some of the pressure on Minister Fitzharris, but it was clearly not enough.
Now, Minister Stephen-Smith, in her health and community services portfolios, holds responsibility for 38 per cent of the ACT budget, again with the biggest capital works project in the budget. The Chief Minister should have a close look at ministerial portfolios and the workload borne by ministers.
It is now more than 10 months since the establishment of ACT Health and Canberra Health Services as separate agencies, and that restructure is yet to bear fruit. This is confirmed by a large range of performance indicators.
Two years ago, the former Minister for Health and Wellbeing claimed in this place that emergency department waiting times were coming down. She claimed it repeatedly. But they have not been coming down; they have been going up. EDÂ waiting times blew out badly in 2017-18, due, we were told, to a bad 2017 flu season. There was a slight recovery in 2018 due to a milder flu season, or so it seems, but the quarterly performance report for the third quarter of 2018-19 showed that waiting times in emergency departments increased across the board.
We had an early start to the flu season this year, with the Chief Health Officer advising that the flu season had arrived fully two months earlier than anticipated. There were nearly 1,000 presentations at the Canberra Hospital between 11 May and 20 June, and patients were being kept in the corridors of the emergency departments at both the Canberra Hospital and Calvary Public Hospital. The flu season started in mid-May, yet the winter bed strategy did not start until 11 July, more than two months after the onset of the flu season. This is a result of ongoing capacity issues at the Canberra Hospital. Things were not quite as bad at Calvary hospital, where the winter bed strategy started on 25 June.
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