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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2945 ..

over a minor injury—a broken bone—and it took six hours for that person to have it attended to. I have heard of a few other people who have had similar experiences with basic injuries that normally would not take long to be attended to and I have heard of other problems arising out of people going to the emergency department. I have mentioned several times and I will mention again the case of the 85-year-old woman who was at the hospital for 3¾ days before she finally had her arm mended and was discharged. For other persons it has taken well over a day for things that used to take only a matter of hours.

That, combined with the fact that the targets of the emergency department for category 2, 3 and 4 patients have not been reached and are not in some instances close to being reached—a 15 per cent variance in relation to category 2 patients was the target and the outcome was 65 per cent—should really get the warning bells going. I think that there are some really worrying signs in relation to our health system. It is stretched. In recent days there have been articles in the newspaper about the hospital system not being able to handle major emergencies. That is of concern because our hospital system is supposed to support not only the people of the ACT but also the people of the region surrounding the ACT and there are these problems despite the fact that we are spending a considerable amount of money on the health system, close to one-third more than we were a few years ago.

I wish to make a number of points in relation to what the Estimates Committee heard. Overtime is a big issue. I was interested to see the figures there. Officers of the department said that something like 3.9 per cent of the nurses do overtime regularly. That may be so, but they are probably concentrated in the most important areas, where you really do want your hospital staff to be on the ball and not to be overtired. I know quite a few nurses in the system. My wife is an ex-nurse. I have spoken to a number of nurses who have been in the system for over 30 years and who have said that the situation has never been so bad but, because they are the dedicated professionals that they are, they feel that they cannot really knock back the overtime, so they take it on.

It might be true, as the officials said, that some nurses like working overtime and use it to manage their personal budgets, but that is not the case with many of the ones I talk to. All the ones I talk to are getting very tired and are sick of having to double up and do overtime. I think that the department and the minister really need to take that on board, because that simply is unsafe and is a situation that we should not allow to continue. You cannot work these professionals until they drop; similarly with the other medical staff. I have spoken to a number of doctors who are working 13 or 14-hour shifts. Again, if you have heavy shifts you get to a dangerous point for everyone. It is simply not fair on those professionals to put them in that situation as often as, sadly, is the case now.

I am not going to go into the issue of entrapment and the smoke police. Ms Dundas said something about that and I probably said something about it in introducing the report of the Estimates Committee. Ms Dundas briefly mentioned preventive health. I think that it is a very important subject. In that regard, the Estimates Committee explored the role of Healthpact and Mrs Dunne and I expressed concern over the funding for Healthpact.

Healthpact was set up to promote healthy outcomes. It was set up initially, probably back in the First Assembly, to buy out tobacco sponsorship of major sporting and artistic events. The sporting events were mainly racing events and I think that only two had to be

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