Page 1446 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 26 September 1989
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agree - to keep Royal Canberra open as a significant community hospital. We would also wish to retain the site of the Royal Canberra Hospital for community purposes, preferably for medical community purposes, but that all depends on the cost. We will be exploring the cost very carefully and I hope that we can provide what I have just said are the two most important things from our point of view, which ultimately will depend on the cost. If the ACT's overall costs are too great, we shall have to address ways of bringing them back into line and of providing the ACT with efficient services. That is by far the most important task of government, and if it is not possible to do that then we are in a very sorry state indeed.
MR MOORE (8.10): In Dr Kearney's acknowledgments in his report he stated, along with his principal recommendations relating to planning and structuring, "However, people who work in the hospitals are the key to making the service work". That is one of the keys that I believe has been ignored to a certain extent in the report to the Minister for Community Services and Health, the ACT Public Hospital Redevelopment Steering Committee report. It was at a very late stage - and I have congratulated the Minister on this - that he had the Nurses Federation represented on the particular steering committee, and yet it was Kearney's recommendation and clear wish that the people who work there be the ones who make the system work.
Dr Kearney also suggested that the ACT Community and Health Service request the ANU to negotiate with the university medical school to provide formal arrangements for entry of ACT school students, for the ANU to work with the hospitals to provide a component of clinical undergraduate medical education to that medical school. Further, his recommendation 12.2 was that consideration be given to the establishment of a postgraduate medical school concentrating on existing areas of strength in the John Curtin School of Medical Research.
One of the major factors that was not taken into account, as far as I can see from my reading of the ACT Public Hospital Redevelopment Steering Committee report, was the issue of a teaching hospital linked to a university. It is very clear to anybody who looks at this, even from a cursory glance, that the logical spot for a teaching hospital would be next to one of the most advanced medical research facilities in Australia. The relationship I speak about, of course, is that between the Royal Canberra Hospital and the Australian National University.
That we have some problems with our hospital system and the cost of our hospital system is apparent, and that we have some problems with the service that we deliver and the service we could possibly deliver is also apparent from Dr Kearney's report. That we need to make some compromises is even more apparent. So far the suggestions about compromises have all been about where the most money will be spent and therefore should we compromise Woden Valley Hospital or should we compromise Royal Canberra Hospital.
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