Page 1783 - Week 06 - Thursday, 19 May 1994
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The Minister has asked that the Opposition come forward with ideas for Health. We are happy to come forward with some suggestions. I would encourage the Minister to move immediately to accelerate the introduction of casemix funding for the ACT. Put simply, casemix funding, as I am sure the Minister knows by now, allows hospitals to be paid for what they actually do. If a hospital treats more patients it gets more money. The results, from looking at the Victorian situation, are very clear. Casemix provides financial incentives, Mr Connolly - something that Health desperately needs.
Unions and management at the hospital should also be encouraged to hammer out an enterprise based agreement for the whole of the hospital. This would permit greater flexibility in both rostering and leave arrangements, and provide an award that would better reflect the particular industrial circumstances of our hospital. I have already supported Mr Connolly in his decision to approve additional private hospital beds in the ACT, but if that is as far as it goes we have been treated to a typical Connolly media exercise. The Minister must entertain hopes for a closer working relationship between the private and public sectors in the ACT for him to have a chance of succeeding. He must make some real changes. Mr Connolly should do what his predecessor could not do, and that is to put management of our health system first and ideology last - in fact, ideology nowhere. No-one interested in fixing our health system views public and private health in the same simplistic way as Mr Berry did any more, whichever government we are talking about.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order! Your time has expired.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General and Minister for Health) (3.57): I must say at the outset that I was pleased, Mrs Carnell, that I upset your Saturday morning when you read the good news story about Health in the Canberra Times. It is my objective, Mrs Carnell, that on many more of your Saturday mornings you can fume over your cup of coffee as you see yet another good news story about ACT Health.
Madam Speaker, when I saw the topic of the MPI on the paper this morning I hoped that we would have a non-partisan constructive debate on ways forward for ACT Health; but unfortunately we tended to hear, once again, the litany of complaint and grizzle about ACT Health. Every opposition blames every government about the woes of ACT Health. I was taken to task for my statement that we have a community problem. The fact is, Madam Speaker, that we do. We made a statement in last year's budget that we would get a major management consultancy firm to come in and look at ACT Health. We did that with Arthur Andersens, who are internationally well regarded. I tabled the report at the earliest opportunity. The principal recommendation of Arthur Andersen, the first action that they recommend that we take, is to establish what they called an interim financial board. I announced the other day that the resource management committee would be formed, and I ran through its personnel. It matched what Arthur Andersens recommended, including a principal of Arthur Andersens. I am pleased to advise the Assembly that, while members were enjoying their sandwiches, I was racing out to the hospital at lunchtime today for the first meeting of the resource management committee.
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