Page 2401 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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This is a process that we have to get right. The minister has a number of reports and consultations. I understand that opinions have changed since Mr Corbell was in office. Minister Gallagher, I understand, went back to the community and has received another report with different views from that which the government had previously received. It will be incredibly interesting to see what we will get from this unit at the end of the process. It simply highlights that, at a governmental level and departmental level, this government cannot deliver capital works on time and on budget to meet their promises. That is a shame.
We have an enormous budget here for health. It is about 20 per cent or 25 per cent higher than the national average. At $665 million, we should have the best, most progressive, best equipped, best stocked, best staffed health system in the country. (Second speaking period taken.) I know that the staff do their best. At a meeting I went to last night, I was speaking to a nurse who had been working on the oncology ward. She said, “We just cannot keep staff.” The system is so stressed by the reforms of this government and the staff have been working so much overtime that they are stressed and they are not coming back. She told me of a night when she was in the oncology ward or near the oncology ward and, she said, for a ward with 22 oncology patients there was a staff roster of seven and three nurses on duty.
You would think that in a ward as important as the oncology ward—all wards are important, but as important as the oncology ward—having three staff on duty is appalling. This nurse said that she has seen incidents where senior staff—she did not say whether they were nursing or actual management—were coming down to help make beds. This is a nurse at the front line of the Canberra Hospital, where the senior staff have to come and make beds because there are not enough staff.
How can that happen in a system that the Productivity Commission said was $100 million over-funded—all of that extra money. No-one is saying to take the money out. What we are saying is: make the money work for the benefit of the patients and make the money work for the staff.
We have had three ministers in health. Mr Stanhope took it because it was easy to fix—$6 million was going to fix it. Everybody knew that was pie in the sky, because of the approach that the government was taking. When we were in office, we had an independent hospital board. The board was scoring goals. It was kicking goals. The waiting lists were coming down. We were doing more with less. We had less bed block, less access block and fewer crises. We were achieving. The government’s process—
Ms Gallagher: Fewer patients.
MR SMYTH: Fewer patients? No, no, no. The hospital at the time was running at some of the levels that you are talking about. It was running at 95, 96 and 97 per cent full.
Ms Gallagher: No, it was not.
MR SMYTH: It certainly was.
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