Page 276 - Week 01 - Thursday, 24 February 1994
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This is at a time when we honestly cannot afford it. We have more beds being lost at Woden Valley Hospital than any of us could have imagined in our wildest dreams. At the same time, Mr Berry wants to go ahead with a hospice that will cost us $400,000 a year more to run. We have had a number of consultancies on this. Every one of them has said that this hospice must be associated with a major hospital because it will simply cost us too much. There is not one hospice in this country currently being built or built in the recent past that has not been associated with a major hospital. There was a time in the seventies when it was trendy to build hospices separately, but they were big ones - 60-bed ones, Mr Berry, not 17-bed ones.
MR BERRY (Minister for Health, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport) (3.24): Mr Deputy Speaker, the first thing I would like to deal with before I get to the hospice, and I will spend a little time on this issue, is the performance of the public hospital system. If you look at the report provided to you, the average length of stay, year to date, is falling. That means that more people will be going through. Mrs Carnell made a claim about 482 beds. She wants to exclude day surgery beds because it mucks up her flash little press release if you include them.
Mrs Carnell: No, I did not, because people do not stay overnight in them.
MR BERRY: That is right; you need fewer beds as a result. Up to 35 per cent of all our admissions are done through day surgery. You cannot just ignore that. It means that you need fewer beds, so you have to include it.
Let us have a look at the performance of Health. We will talk about people, not beds, for a change. In 1990-91 - Mr Humphries would not remember this because he was not one for figures - 47,301 people were treated in 867 beds. In 1991-92 - Mr Humphries still would not remember this; as I said, he never had a head for figures - 47,976 were treated in 825 beds, an improving performance; and in 1992-93, 50,542 people were treated in 797 beds. We are doing better; we are much smarter; we are more efficient. We are talking about people - 50,500 people in 797 beds. We are doing more people in the hospital with fewer beds, which is more efficient.
This year the target was 50,500, and the apologist for the doctors climbs on her feet and complains about that as well. The doctors strike cost us a lot of money and it cost us a lot of productivity. Whilst the doctors were on strike we were not going to attack our other workers, and we had to pay for them standing idly by while the doctors refused to take people off the waiting list. That was their problem. They refused to do their work. If you want to apologise for the doctors, if you want to play their game, you are going to have to share some of the shame, ma'am. The target is 50,500. We will do it this year and we will do it with fewer people.
All members of the Assembly are aware that the negotiations for the establishment of a hospice service in the ACT began in the 1980s. After consideration of all the factors and all the arguments, this Government made the decision to site the hospice on Acton Peninsula. I announced this decision in the Legislative Assembly in August 1991 and the decision was reaffirmed in our election commitments in February 1992 and in June 1992.
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