Page 354 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 7 March 2006
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… presentation during high ED occupancy was associated with increased in-hospital mortality at 10 days … The magnitude of the effect is about 13 deaths per year.
This means that, when the hospital’s ED is overcrowded, there are more deaths than when it is not overcrowded. Professor Peter Cameron, in the Medical Journal of Australia, states that “an overcrowded hospital should now be regarded as an unsafe hospital”. As the ACT hospitals are now unsafe, what actions are you taking to ensure that the ACT community has appropriate health care in our public hospitals?
MR CORBELL: ACT public hospitals are not unsafe. That is essentially the sort of scaremongering that we have come to expect from those on the other side of this place. Whenever it comes to bad news about public health systems, I can bet you who the first on the bandwagon is—it will be Mr Smyth. But when there is good news about our public hospital systems, do we hear anything from Mr Smyth? Do we have someone who comes and welcomes the fact that service delivery is being improved? The answer to that is: not a peep. For example, when elective surgery waiting lists went down by more than 600 since the beginning of last year, did we hear anything from Mr Smyth? Not a word.
To respond to Mr Smyth’s question, we are doing a range of very important things to improve the situation at our emergency department to avoid access block and overcrowding, wherever possible. For example, the government has funded an additional 20 acute-medical beds; it has provided an additional $15 million for elective surgery; it has established discharge lounges at both of our public hospitals to free up beds; it has funded better community-based care to enable high-needs children to be cared for at home; it has funded an additional three intensive-care-unit beds; it has allocated another $10 million for 60 new non-acute aged-care beds; and we have funded new emergency medical units in our emergency departments.
That is what this government is doing, and it is achieving results. For example, in the last 12 months, access block at the Canberra Hospital has dropped from 45 per cent to 27 per cent. This situation is being addressed, and it is being addressed comprehensively by this government. Access block and overcrowding are issues faced by every major hospital in the country and many around the world. This is not an issue that we are ignoring; this is an issue we are tackling head-on.
There is more that we are doing. For example, we now have up and running new after-hours GP services included at our public hospitals. We have put in place new and better hospital discharge practices. People are discharged in a timely way, freeing up beds for people who need them. We have expanded the home and community care services to keep people healthy and well in their own homes. We are putting a strong focus on prevention, to prevent admission in the first place. The most successful of these to date is our falls prevention program which is designed to prevent older people from suffering a fall and the debilitating medical consequences of that.
These are some of the measures that we are putting in place. They are comprehensive and they are working. They are working in reducing access block. I do not know where Mr Smyth learned his arithmetic, but 45 down to 27 is an improvement when it comes to access block in our emergency departments. But Mr Smyth is not interested in the facts. Mr Smyth is not interested in what the government is doing. Mr Smyth is not interested
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