Page 3338 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
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What we hear from those opposite is: “Let us have an inquiry. Let us set up a committee. Let us do a report.” That is what we hear from those opposite, but that is not going to fix our public hospital system. What will fix our public hospital system are the steps this government has invested in significantly over the past six years: 140 extra beds for our public hospital system; more money for our emergency departments; doubling the per capita amount spent on mental health services; investment in extra operating theatres and a record level of elective surgery. These are the things that this government is doing to address our public hospital system.
As the health minister pointed out quite appropriately, in a large-scale system that deals with tens and tens of thousands of people every year, it is difficult to ensure that the system works without fault. But this government has ensured that mechanisms are in place so that when mistakes are made the system learns from its mistakes and takes steps to ensure that they do not occur again.
When we came to office there was no clinical privileges mechanism that worked across the territory. We had the absurd situation where a doctor could be barred from working in, say, the public hospital but could continue to work in a private hospital across the city because the clinical privileges system did not communicate between hospitals. We have fixed that. We now have a uniform clinical privileges system in place to ensure that it works across the public and private sectors. It should not matter whether the hospital is owned and operated by the community or by the private sector. It is, nevertheless, an issue of public safety. So we have put in place those clinical privileges systems.
There were issues raised, for example, with the previous health minister, Mr Moore, around Dr Gerry McLaren and complaints around the conduct of neurosurgery at the Canberra Hospital. They were not able to be dealt with in the Canberra Hospital because there was no coherent clinical privileges system in place. A clinical privileges system is the mechanism that is used to identify errors and problems with safety of care and to address them down the track. These are the types of measures that this government and this administration have put into place.
In contrast, what we have from those opposite is simply a proposal to establish yet another committee, yet another board, yet another report and spend millions of dollars on a big lump of paper which is not going to improve one bit the delivery of health services in our community. In fact, so fixated are those opposite on tinkering with the bureaucracy that they want to establish a board. They think that another layer of bureaucracy will help the delivery of health services to the Canberra community. They have an uphill battle to explain how another level of bureaucracy—another committee—is going to improve access to the emergency department, improve the delivery of elective surgery and improve the management of bed block in our public hospitals. They simply have not made the argument.
The argument that they do make when they try to substantiate this flawed position is that it will put the doctors in charge of running the hospital. They say, “We want the doctors to be caring for the patients. We do not want the doctors and nurses having to worry about all the minutiae of running a public hospital system and all the
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