Page 2372 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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The thing about the health budget is that, with its focus on hospital care and its insatiable need for expensive diagnostic instruments and complex machines—there are new ones out every year, each better than the last—the maintenance of existing equipment and the cost of the technicians to operate them and analyse the results, not to mention the doctors, the nurses, the specialists, the administrators and the cleaners, who are very important in a hospital and needed to keep the place running, is that it will always be under resourced. People will want their hospital to be able to fix every ailment and ill.
We may be a small city, but we are a capital city, and we develop our benchmarks based on bigger cities like Sydney and Melbourne. The health system, therefore, will always provide targets for oppositions to point the finger at: waiting lists, emergency department delays, infection rates and unhappy people working too hard for too long and not feeling properly valued. The opposition can always talk about health and hospitals if it wants to bag the government. No doubt, the incumbent government, when it was in opposition, did the same.
I recognise the complexity of providing good health services and I am not planning to bag the government, but it is my desire to be constructively critical. I want to put on the record that I am not a disinterested observer in regard to health. I have benefited from the extraordinarily high standards of health care that I have received as a public patient in the Canberra hospital. Greens members and voters, like anybody else in this city, use and appreciate a good health system, including hospitals, and it is hard to see how we cannot continue to spend large amounts of our revenue, heavily bolstered by federal funding, on acute care health services. But I think we have to find a way of working smarter to improve our health services, including reducing the costs of hospitals. But if we do not want to do this, then we cannot complain about taxes.
Peter Martin put an interesting proposition in Tuesday’s Canberra Times, that we turn the health system into a kind of production line for the safety of patients. His example of a hospital entirely focused on hernia operations is instructive in demonstrating cost savings and success rates when surgeons are not challenged to perform other procedures. The people performing the operations had learnt their skills as apprentices, avoiding the many years of general and then specialised education which is necessary for gaining entry into the school of surgeons here in Australia.
There is a problem with this way of cutting costs. It requires patients to travel vast distances to access the specialised services. Fancy a trip to Canada, anybody? These costs need to be laid against specific—
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Dr Foskey, would you pause for a minute. The volume on both sides is getting a bit too high. I ask members to show a bit more respect for the speaker.
Mr Hargreaves: How about respect for the Deputy Speaker? That is stretching it.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: You will just have to live with it, Mr Hargreaves. Carry on, Dr Foskey.
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