Page 2786 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 13 August 2019
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I commend the investments in mental health and justice health made in the 2019-20 ACT budget to the Assembly and look forward to supporting Canberra’s mental health and justice health system to continue to develop in future.
MS LAWDER (Brindabella) (3.21): I would like to make a few points relating to the health budget in this year’s appropriation. I want to reiterate that here in the ACT, emergency department waiting times are going up. Eighteen years ago, we had the best ED wait times. We have the failure of accreditation reviews. For years, we have heard about workplace culture and bullying issues in our hospital system. People can spend years waiting for specialist appointments. There are long waiting times for other types of surgery, such as bariatric surgery. We have failed to replace equipment as it ages, to the point where, in one case at least, there was a fire in the switchboard, which had already been identified as a risk. We have had the long-running saga of data issues. Our adolescent mental health system is inadequate and we have long waits in our adult mental health unit.
We have recently seen the saga with the hydrotherapy pool and this minister wanting to close the hydrotherapy pool at the Canberra Hospital and leave people on the south side without a suitable alternative. We have had the worst performance in elective surgery. We have high costs in delivering our health services, at 120 per cent of the national efficient price and 130 per cent of what it costs to deliver services in our peer hospitals. We have spent $15 million on the Ngunnawal bush healing farm, which is still not a residential drug and alcohol rehab facility, and now, apparently, we are going to spend money on developing a completely different one. Ear, nose and throat patients wait over a year to be seen. Cancer patients in Canberra have the longest waits in the country to start treatment, according to AIHW data.
Many of us here will have had contact with our health and hospital service, either personally or through family members, friends, neighbours or work colleagues. In the past six months, I have spent more time at the Canberra Hospital than I would normally like to, with family members with various issues, in the emergency department, in the intensive care unit, and on wards.
No-one—certainly not I, but I do not think anyone I have spoken to—questions the care, compassion, professionalism and dedication of our staff at our hospitals: nurses, doctors, specialists, wardsmen, cleaners, people in the food area, no-one is questioning their dedication and their skill. The way they deal with patients is generally amazing. That is literally a word my daughter said to me recently: that the care she got when her husband was in the hospital was amazing.
The health minister earlier talked about our strong record of investment, but the point I want to make in this very brief talk about our health budget is that it is not just about spending more money; it is how we are spending that money. It is about decision-making, planning, leadership and replacing things before they reach the end of their useful life, before there is a fire, before they break down. That is where we are failing, and that is what we need to pay a lot more attention to, not talking about the criticism of our staff.
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