Page 194 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 6 March 2007
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Importantly, 20 of the beds will provide care for older persons with acute mental illness or challenging behaviour. This will bring together under one roof the special expertise required to care for these patients. The care provided in this service will be fully integrated with the community-based older persons’ mental health team and other community stakeholders. The Aged Care and Rehabilitation Service will manage the remaining beds.
The services in the new unit will help patients to get back the essential living skills that they may have lost through their illness or period of stay in hospital to prepare them better for when they go home or, as I said, into other types of supported accommodation.
The new unit will also have the first two designated beds in the ACT to manage the rehabilitation needs of the morbidly obese. These patients generally take longer to recover from hospital episodes and also generally have special needs to consider in the management of their rehabilitation,
The new facility has a range of services. It is different from a hospital environment and I am sure that it will provide the care and treatment that older Canberrans have been after for many years. It is not just adding 51 beds to the hospital system. It is looking at the type of care we provide and the types of beds because demand by the aging population is changing. The demand is for different types of beds, not just acute type beds.
The facility began taking patients in the week commencing 26 February 2007. I look forward to the success of the service. I know that there will be demand for services. The facility will operate at a cost of around $10 million a year recurrent and will provide care and support for the special needs of the types of patients that will be referred there.
These new beds, 60 in total, will very much add to our public hospital system and help us meet the increasing needs of our community for access to a diverse range of health services and accommodation types.
MS PORTER: I ask a supplementary question. Minister, you mentioned the many additional beds that the government has added to the system over the last three budgets. Can you please explain the location and impact of these beds?
MS GALLAGHER: As I said, in every budget since coming to government, the government has been looking strategically at where new beds should be provided. These include 40 acute medical beds provided in the last two budgets, three ICU beds to enhance the ICU service across the ACT, short stay beds for patients in emergency departments and an additional 15 transitional care beds, jointly funded by the commonwealth and ACT governments, for elderly patients managed by Baptist Community Services. They include the subacute facility beds about which I have just spoken.
In April we will have an additional 14 MAPU—that is, management and planning unit—beds which, again, will target elderly patients coming in through emergency
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