Page 2909 - Week 10 - Thursday, 7 October 2021
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demand for people seeking care and treatment. It was the second strongest pattern in the community’s publicly available submissions.
To end, I take the chance to highlight what I see as one of the most significant wins for our healthcare system, healthcare workers and the patients that they care for—that is, the commitment of this government to implementing nurse to patient ratios and the funding to meet them. While both the ACT Labor party and the ACT Greens would like to take their share of credit for such a bold funding announcement, I believe that the credit fully goes to the ACT Branch of the Australian Nurse and Midwifery Federation for their campaign to implement these ratios. I was lucky to meet with branch secretary Matthew Daniel in March this year and we discussed a pledge that the majority of members took before the election, to implement these ratios.
May this be a timely reminder to all Canberrans of the power of activist, unionised workforces, and I encourage all working Canberrans to join their union because these are the results that you see. The ACT Greens committed to introducing nurse to patient ratios after working with the ANMF during last year’s election. We know these ratios save lives by reducing the chance of secondary infections and other complications. Adequate numbers of nurses allow for constant monitoring and attention to deteriorating patients, meaning that they receive care sooner in their illness. This prevents unnecessary deaths and ongoing injuries.
This commitment will help to strengthen patient safety and the quality of care in our hospitals. The evidence also demonstrates that nurse to patient ratios also help to prevent burnout, helping us to retain staff and ensure that they too are cared for. I am pleased that these ratios will be implemented within a few months into general medical, surgical wards; acute aged care; and acute mental health units. This successful campaign is evidence of the union’s hard work.
In my final remarks, I note that I have touched on a number of different areas of public health care in this city which, fortunately, Mrs Jones’s broadly prepared motion gave me the opportunity to do. But I really want to underline the fact of why I felt that that was so important. As the ACT Greens spokesperson for health, I get a little bit frustrated with the constant public conversation about the success or failure of our public healthcare system, resulting on two top-line figures—how long you wait in the emergency room and how long you wait for an elective surgery.
These are both important measures of the success of our healthcare system and important to note, but there is so much more to healthy, safe, well-connected communities; there is so much more work happening across the ACT healthcare system more broadly. It should be a commitment of all people in this place and all parties represented in this place to focus on programs, investments and solutions that keep Canberrans out of hospital in the first place, whether that be quit smoking campaigns; greater access to alcohol and other drugs services; early intervention mental health campaigns; perinatal wellbeing at nurse-led walk-in centres; greater access to bulk-billing GPs—the list goes on.
I encourage all Canberrans engaged in the debate on public health care in this city to reflect on health care in its broadest possible scope, to think of the many different
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