Page 3460 - Week 11 - Thursday, 15 November 2007
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record amounts in our education system. The education budget has never been larger. Some $350 million has been invested in the public system. A range of new initiatives has been invested in non-government schools, as I announced last week. There is a collaborative process for the new curriculum framework. That has been an outstanding success in engaging teachers and educators from across the education spectrum in the ACT to achieve a great outcome for students. It has raised the quality of education in this territory even higher.
We have the best education system in Australia. We look to build on that through this new framework and through the government’s increased investment in education. Most importantly, with the election of a Rudd Labor government in two Saturday’s time, we will finally, for the first time in the last 11 years, have both a commonwealth government and a territory government working together to enhance education in this territory.
Hospitals—patient administration system
MR MULCAHY: My question is to the Minister for Health. Minister, from the most recently available details on patient activity in the ACT’s public hospitals it is evident that the new patient administration system is still not providing the data that it should be—and this remains the situation more than a year after the system was meant to be fully operational. Minister, why is it still not possible for the new patient administration system to provide all the data that is relevant to managing the ACT’s public hospitals?
MS GALLAGHER: As I have said previously, the implementation of the new patient administration system was a huge job. The system was introduced just over a year ago, in September 2006. The system looks after all the recordings of admissions, scheduling and billing functions across all ACT Health services.
There were a number of issues that came out when the system was first introduced in September. As we have worked through those, we have dealt with the most critical first. All of those critical major issues which could potentially seriously affect the running of the system were dealt with in order of priority. In my briefings, the main ones were around appointment settings and billing information. The appointments process was the hardest one, because that could have had the result of stuffing up a whole range of appointments, particularly across the hospital. We had a team brought in to start addressing the implementation issues, and they have worked very hard.
The project has formally been completed—in October. There are a couple of issues still awaiting final resolution. One is data migration from the medical record online record retrieval system, which is ongoing. The backload is currently being tested and looks good at this stage, I am advised. The ACTPAS support team continues to receive a large number of help desk calls per week. It is receiving around 200 phone calls. The team is still busy dealing with those calls and making sure that they can deal with individual issues as they arise.
From my understanding, there are not any major issues outstanding with ACTPAS. In terms of some of the data, yes, but we have left the data. It does not mean that data is not being collected and will not be provided; it just means that there have been some
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