Page 1994 - Week 07 - Thursday, 13 August 2020
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people who have had joint replacements at Calvary John James in the public system. It is an excellent service at Calvary John James, providing orthopaedic surgery, and it is a deliberate part of our elective surgery strategy. It is not an accident; it is not a mistake—and the same is the case with moving more elective surgery over to Calvary, opening two new theatres at Calvary to deliver more elective surgery so that we can meet our targets and we can meet our record numbers of elective surgeries.
Mrs Dunne likes to draw on Mr Stanhope’s analysis, but what we have seen is a significant improvement in performance in elective surgery from 2009-10 to 2018-19—a four percentage point increase in category 1 seen on time, and a 26 percentage point increase in category 2 seen on time over the last 10 years. There have been more elective surgeries and more category 1 and 2 elective surgeries seen on time, and there has been a significant improvement in that performance.
Is it everything we would want it to be? No. Does any health system ever entirely meet demand for elective surgery? Probably not, because the demand for elective surgery actually increases, the better you do. But we have more beds per 1,000 people than the average for Australia. We have kept that up. We have kept up our investment in elective surgery, and we have kept up our investment in infrastructure.
Mrs Dunne claimed that the ACT government has failed to deliver on anything under the capital asset development plan that was developed under the—
Mrs Dunne: I didn’t say that.
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: Actually, you did, Mrs Dunne. You said that I have not delivered anything. Many of those projects have, of course, been completed. I refer to the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children, the Canberra Region Cancer Centre, the southern car park, the adult mental health unit—and the list goes on.
We have also invested in some infrastructure that was not envisaged in that plan, some of which was planned by the former excellent health minister and now senator, Katy Gallagher—the University of Canberra Hospital, a specialist rehabilitation hospital that was not in the CADP and that was not envisaged in 2008. What this says is that time moves on, and our planning needs to move on with it.
We are currently doing a Canberra Hospital master plan, but I have said to people that if everything we say in the Canberra Hospital master plan is exactly what Canberra Hospital looks like in 2040 I will fall off my chair, because things change. New opportunities arise, including opportunities to move services out of our hospitals, as we have done with building the incredibly popular and successful network of nurse-led walk-in centres. That has been part of our investment in health services for Canberrans.
Of course, we are still working to expand on the Canberra Hospital campus, not only with the largest investment in health infrastructure since self-government, in the Canberra Hospital expansion and the SPIRE building, but also with new buildings to support that, as things get moved out and areas get refurbished. I refer also to the
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