Page 2961 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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what we are doing”. It is concerning that we are not listening to those people who can help us to make the changes necessary. I thank members.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.42): I thank the Liberal opposition for bringing up this issue today, but I see that we are to talk about it again tomorrow. And we did talk about it this morning. I am hoping that all this talk does result in some action. I am aware that the government’s response is often not to even acknowledge that there are problems and to instead give us a list of initiatives that it has taken. And everyone here will be aware that I understand the extreme difficulties in running a hospital system. Certainly I would acknowledge that it is absolutely impossible to avoid things going wrong. I think it would be really good if we could all start off from that premise. But, of course, every measure should be taken to reduce that likelihood to a minimum.
I note that there will be a coronial inquest into the death of Allan Osterberg—and that death has clearly had a part to play in bringing on a litany of concerns about the emergency services—and that there will be an internal review. It is very, very hard to put in place permanent changes when we are looking at the kind of continual staffing turnover that we see in emergency services, a place where I have been more often than I would have liked, including recently, and where I find that certainly the immediate concerns of people waiting are looked after.
Perhaps there is a lesson—and I consider that this is probably because of the terms of reference that the emergency centre is just to deal with that emergency—but I do not feel that people always walk out of emergency services, not just here in the ACT but elsewhere, with an understanding of their condition and how to deal with it in the future. Nonetheless, emergency services are there to deal with emergencies, and obviously this is one of the places of vulnerability in the hospital system. Therefore, I will hope that the internal review and the coronial inquest come out with useful recommendations that the government is prepared to listen to.
I note also that Mrs Burke has asked the Auditor-General to look at the issue of emergency departments, another hot potato issue for the Auditor-General to deal with. And I guess there would need to be an understanding of the limitations with which the Auditor-General can approach a topic like emergency departments.
While the ACT government funds emergency wards, it is the federal government that funds GPs through bulk-billing and by assisting some practices in the setup costs. And it looks very much as though in the ACT people often go to emergency by default. In my own experience, anything that ever happens medically happens on the weekend. I can say that that is almost 100 per cent, and when I lived in the bush that often meant driving for two hours to the nearest doctor or hospital, finding they were not open and then driving for another hour to the next one. So these are issues that everyone is grappling with across Australia.
But I guess it is a little bit of a surprise that in this comfortable capital city we have a shortage of about 60 general practitioners, and that is an awful lot. When you think of how many patients each doctor handles, then that is an awful lot of people who do not have their own doctors. And unlike everyone else, I have now found a doctor whose books were still open—they are probably not anymore—but the incredible
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