Page 2768 - Week 09 - Thursday, 27 September 2007
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Auburn hospital in New South Wales where we had extensive and highly informative briefings. We were originally going to send the committee secretary, but the Speaker took the view that it required a member to go, and on rather short notice I made that journey to Sydney.
I must say that, whilst it came at a time that was not terribly convenient, the information gleaned from that visit was extremely valuable. As I recall, colleagues went later on for further examination into the procedures being applied at Auburn. Those discussions were illuminating and provided us, I think, with some measure of confidence in what could be achieved if all the players in the hospital system were working profitably and singing off the one hymn sheet, so to speak.
Mr Speaker, when you trawl through the records of this place, you see various reports that have been written over the years that suggest a lot of work has gone in. I spoke of one yesterday in the debate on Ms Porter’s motion on the fireworks. You do worry that all this work is expended and then they gather dust. Whilst they might be subject to a response, often it seems that not enough happens thereafter. I would hope that this report, which, from memory, was 135 pages—it might have come back to about 122 so it must have lost a few pages in our final editing—does receive the appropriate level of scrutiny and examination.
It was not done in a hasty fashion, and I firmly believe that this is one of the most important issues facing the people of Canberra. I harangue my colleagues about the importance of health as an issue in the minds of the people of Canberra. If my correspondence received is any indication, then the matter of elective surgery waiting lists is one of the two biggest single issues on public health that are raised with me by the electors of Molonglo. Elective surgery waiting lists are a major concern in the Canberra community and certainly this report goes some way towards providing solutions.
I would not stand here and say that this report has all the answers, because I do not think it is that simple. I have even talked to my youngest brother, who is a specialist, but not in this jurisdiction. He acknowledges the vexed complexity of waiting lists for elective surgery and has said to me that it is a quandary, particularly for politicians, because, he said, it is essentially inefficient not to have waiting lists for elective surgery. But as elected representatives we also know the frustration people have when those waiting lists for elective surgery are at a level that people find unacceptable and unreasonable. So there is a balancing act between community need and also the level of efficiency in the provision of health services. We do not want health workers standing around with nothing to do because we are putting through people so quickly.
Adding to the complexity of the health economics in this debate is that, as you improve the efficiency—this concept is alluded to in this report and it takes some grasping—you actually increase the number of people who then want to avail themselves of the waiting lists because they say they can get through quicker than in a situation where they are deterred because of the length of the waiting list. So it becomes somewhat circuitous at times.
We have tried to tackle a number of those issues in this report. The research associated with the report looks globally at the research that is out there and the
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