Page 2380 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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Ms Gallagher: It is done.
MR SMYTH: the very strategic indicator No 3 on bed occupancy. The minister has set herself a very ambitious target: to reduce from an expected current outcome of 93 per cent, which I am not sure we have achieved—and we will only find out when the annual report turns up—to a 2007-08 figure of 90 per cent, with a long-term target—it is not determined what long term means—of 85 per cent. This is about bed usage—acute and surgical beds, not all the beds that are in the health system. It is acute and surgical—a bed you would go to when you had had surgery or you are crook.
The dilemma for the minister—and it relates to her ability to reform the health system and make up for the failures of Minister Stanhope and Minister Corbell as health ministers—is whether she can deliver this target and account for it in a genuine way. Like all things, the system needs to be lubricated. I am told that best practice says that, if your beds are being used more than 85 per cent of the time, your system is in crisis—it is stressed. On some occasions in recent months we have had, I am told, 100 per cent usage in the hospital system. That means that, should something significantly go wrong in the ACT or the surrounds, we have no capacity to cope.
The system will always work a way through. We saw that on the evening of the bushfires in 2003. Canberrans being the good-hearted and good-natured people that they are, people will assist in whatever way they can. But what we have is a dilemma. We have a government that refuses to admit what it should about the fundamental tool of the nurses, the doctors and the allied health workers—the hospital bed. When a patient is admitted, they cannot be admitted and nothing can occur in the hospital until they have that bed. They cannot get out of triage into the emergency department and they cannot get out of the emergency department and into the hospital. They cannot go into a surgical theatre for elective surgery—it would not apply to emergency surgery, but for elective surgery—until they know that there is a bed for them at the end of the day.
Until we solve this dilemma—I know the minister does not like me talking about beds and access block—then fundamentally the system will be stressed: the nursing staff will be stressed, the doctors will be stressed, the physios and all the other health professionals and allied health workers will be stressed because they will not have the tools to do their job.
When you are asking for $665 million, there should be a clear vision and a clear plan of how we will deliver this. Initially, in 2001, the problem—the crisis that Mr Stanhope whipped up—was going to be fixed with an immediate injection of $6 million. Some $6 million was going to fix the flagging health system that the Liberals had created. That was the allegation: $6 million. It did not fix it. The Reid review did not fix it.
Mr Hargreaves: No, that is right. I do not know if you can fix your problems.
MR SMYTH: Well, no—under your management, Mr Hargreaves. You can. It is about commitment to service; it is about getting it right. It is about listening to the
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