Page 3661 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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"We are doing better. We are opening beds. We are putting more patients through the system". The Minister would remember that one of the questions we asked on Tuesday was about putting more patients through the system. It seems, as we now know, that the figures to the end of August show that fewer patients went through the system; but that, in itself, can be another debate.
The issue of neonatal cots was the last one that I wanted to cover. The comment that the Minister made was that this situation is exactly the same as in New South Wales. The Minister, again, is telling us half the truth. Certainly, what is counted in New South Wales, and in other States, is neonatal intensive care cots, that we already have in our statistics, and humidicribs - full stop. I am confident that the Minister would be very well aware that there are three bays in our special care nursery. The first bay is the neonatal intensive care area, which has four cots. They are already counted in the statistics. Bays 2 and 3 have approximately 10 cots in each.
The babies that are in these cots are babies that need special and varying amounts of care. A number of the babies in bay 2, potentially all of them, could be in humidicribs - there are 10 - if it were full. But, interestingly, bay 3 is not like that. All of the babies are in open cots, cots that are not counted under the New South Wales or Australian statistics, Mr Minister. There is absolutely no way that you can use the same definition as you used to count all the cots in the special care nursery as humidicribs, because they are not. The babies in bay 3 are often babies that were born at a light birth weight or babies that have progressed from the neonatal intensive care area. They are not in humidicribs for 99 per cent of the time. I am sure that there will be one situation where they are, but that is an exception.
The fact is that the figures that you, Minister, are using are fudged. It is that simple. You can use whatever logic you choose; but the fact is that the reason that we are having these debates about beds is that you, Minister, chose to tell this house initially that you were going to reopen all those beds that were closed. You then categorically told the house that you were going to open 24 beds by 1 July. You did not. You did not come back to the house and say why you did not. This week you said that you would open 14 of them, and you have not. The debate on beds was started by you, Minister. If you are going to give figures, if you are going to make comments about how well you are doing in Health, what a wonderful job you are doing, and if you are going to state as a fact that this is what you have done, then, Minister, you have to get it right, because this Assembly and the people of Canberra deserve that. When you come back and show that you have counted totally differently, and added in things that were not added in before, you underestimate everybody here.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General and Minister for Health) (3.59): Madam Speaker, a censure motion is a pretty serious form of the house. It is pretty hard to take this one as seriously as you should take a censure motion. The reality is that members who scan their interstate newspapers, watch ABC news or listen to ABC radio know that there was a motion of censure of Ron Phillips in the New South Wales Parliament this week; so, the local Libs thought that they had better have a motion of censure of the local Health Minister.
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