Page 2369 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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Proposed expenditure—Part 1.10—ACT Health, $628,455,000 (net cost of outputs), $36,319,000 (capital injection) and $658,000 (payments on behalf of the territory), totalling $665,432,000.
MRS BURKE (Molonglo) (5.16): We have before us a health budget appropriation in excess of $665 million. Recent reports from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the State of our public hospitals report of June 2007 clearly identify that the territory health outcomes are lagging behind the rest of Australia in some extremely important areas, and they have been articulated in independent reports during estimates and in this chamber on previous occasions.
We have a health minister, unfortunately, who persistently continues to deny the undeniable even when it comes to nurses being in fear of losing their jobs if they speak out about problems within the system. Broadly speaking, there are numerous suggestions about how the health system might be changed, ranging from pooled funding models and commonwealth takeover of public hospitals to integrated care arrangements.
The real issue, however, is simply better services for all Canberrans and not who delivers them. Where do the government’s budget initiatives address the basic questions of whether patients and taxpayers are receiving value from existing spending and whether existing staff are well utilised? The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report published on 21 July 2007 clearly shows us that the ACT health system is not performing well against other jurisdictions in some major areas, such as emergency departments, where, in the minister’s own words, we clearly need to improve category 3 and 4 time lines, as well as elective surgery.
The minister has said, “We continue to have the longest wait for surgery at 61 days.” This is worse than last year’s report, which indicated that the wait was 45 days. Those statistics speak for themselves. Performance or efficiency gains do not seem to be occurring as well as they might be in other areas, such as acute care, labour costs or the emergency departments in our public hospitals. After some six years of the Stanhope government and three health ministers later, the current minister has conceded that there is still work to be done. As a territory, we clearly are not making the progress that we should be, and could be, despite that huge injection of funding that we keep hearing about. Plainly and simply, millions of dollars have been poured into a health system that is still not meeting the everyday needs of Canberrans.
We focus too much on managing people when they are sick, but there is now a blurring of the line between who is sick and who is well. We are reaching the point in our understanding of diseases where we are able to predict what is going to happen to people in respect of certain diseases, particularly lifestyle diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer. The challenge for here on in will be to maximise the periods of wellbeing through partnerships with GPs, pharmacists et cetera. I welcome the profile our pharmacies enjoy in our community, and rightly so. They have my full support in regard to such initiatives as ask your pharmacy week and the home medicine review scheme. I fully endorse the minister’s notion that our pharmacies are an integral part of our health care system here in the ACT.
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