Page 2952 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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There is a well-known cafe owner in Canberra that I know quite well and that is known to a few of my colleagues—and Mr Smyth knows him well—and I was in his cafe one night, having a cup of coffee with the wife, and he said, “Richard, can you do anything to help us? My dad’s been out there for 30 hours so far and they have not been able to get him into anything.” I thought, “I could go out and call a press conference tomorrow and make a ruckus or I could try to help him.” And I ended up ringing a medical specialist I knew and I said, “Can you do anything to help this fellow?” As it was, he was just being processed at that point and, whilst my friend was happy to help, in fact the process eventually caught up and did address his concerns.
I do not enjoy hearing those stories. They make me very uneasy. They make me worried that one day I might be one of those people. I worry that my relatives might be in that position, or my children and, indeed, any of us here in this place now, friends and colleagues. Rather than just blindly defending everything that goes on in the health system and saying, “Things were no good back in Kate Carnell’s time,” or something, I am really tired of hearing about pre 2001.
People like Mr Seselja and I have been in this place for three years. We want to know what is going on today. We were not part of the past. I am not going to sit here and debate Rosemary Follett’s, Kate Carnell’s or Gary Humphries’s administration. I want to see what is delivered in the year 2007 and what the forward plans are to ensure that the number of problems that we have been confronted with in this hospital system are diminishing and are being managed more effectively. I do not want to hear from elderly people who have been unable to receive timely care in emergency departments or from parents who have been forced to wait with a sick or injured child for an unreasonable amount of time in an emergency department of a Canberra hospital.
I am not going to use names because I respect people’s privacy, but I know of one elderly constituent who suffered a very upsetting and traumatic experience at the Canberra Hospital. By the way, I am always happy to provide the names to anyone in the government who wants them. This particular woman had suffered a broken arm, a traumatic experience that was exacerbated by the standard of care that she received. When she arrived in the hospital by ambulance, my constituent was unable to be received by the emergency department and waited for over an hour in the ambulance. The required surgery was not undertaken for two days, a period during which my constituent had to fast continually in anticipation of the surgery eventually occurring. The woman was extremely upset, as you would understand, by the whole experience and was hesitant to re-enter the health system as a result. This is a real concern. Elderly people will always need to access health care, and there should be a sufficient level of confidence in Canberra’s health system to feel comfortable about accessing those facilities.
Another constituent approached me recently during a shopping centre session at Gungahlin, and he complained that he had waited 12 hours to be seen after presenting to the emergency department at the Canberra Hospital last year. To me, this seems to be an unacceptable length of time. Unfortunately, these complaints are not uncommon. In a 12-month period until the end of July, I received 120 representations about health
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