Page 2410 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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You are not going to have a system that does not deliver that because of the amount of activity that is being delivered in the circumstances that it is delivered in.
Yes, there is an issue around emergency and elective surgery, but what are we to do? Do we say, “Sorry, we’re going to hold this emergency patient because we’ve promised elective surgery”? It is a problem. It is a problem of us being a regional provider to broader south-east New South Wales in the sense that 50 per cent of the surgery every single day at the Canberra Hospital is emergency surgery. We have 10 operating theatres. Five of them are going to be pulled out for emergency surgery every single day, and you cannot say that you can deliver everything to all within that framework. You just cannot. It is the nature of the hospital that we run at TCH.
But when you look at all the indicators, our public patient admission per thousand is higher than the national average. Our utilisation of public hospitals is higher than the national average. People choose to have their elective surgery performed in the public system. All the data shows that. There is choice available. We run a very diverse health system. There are three private hospitals, two public hospitals, yet we have the highest rate of public usage for elective surgery anywhere in the country.
People do not use their private health insurance; they are prepared to wait on the waiting list. We have the highest private health insurance in the country, and the lowest utilisation of it. The only thing you can take out of that is that when people want their surgery, they come to the public system. There is no other way of arguing around that. That is all published data. Again, it is not my twisting figures for my own benefit. We would love some of them to go to the private system. It would ease up some of the pressure on the public system. But the facts are: highest private health cover, lowest utilisation of it. They come to the public system, and that is public confidence in the system.
Mrs Burke: It is offset by Medicare, of course.
MS GALLAGHER: That is not a Third-World hospital system, which is what Mrs Burke thinks it is. All of our quality outcomes are the best in the country.
Mrs Burke: You like that, do you not?
MR SPEAKER: Order, Mrs Burke.
Ms GALLAGHER: If Mrs Burke had not said it on radio about the Third-World hospital system—
Mrs Burke: Really touched a nerve.
MS GALLAGHER: It did. It not only touched my nerve—because it is wrong, because I have visited Third-World hospitals—it also touched quite a number of people’s nerves. You cannot think that you are the only one that people talk to about the hospital system.
Mrs Burke: I don’t at all. They talk to you and you haven’t listened.
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