Page 3613 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 21 November 2007
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The minister said, “There is no evidence. Everything is going wonderfully. We have got the best public health system in Australia.” And yet, when we and look at some of the reports, we see that out of somewhere in the order of six key categories of rankings the ACT is tracking number seven or eight. I do not know how ranking seven or eight puts you in the best performing health system. I am not relying on some back office Liberal Party research. This is from the State of our public hospitals report for 2007. I raised it last week. The minister has never, ever been able to respond to these points, but I will repeat them again for the record: we rank number seven in terms of public hospital beds per 1,000 weighted population; number seven on elective surgery—
Members interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Mulcahy has the floor.
MR MULCAHY: We rank as number seven on elective surgery for the percentage of people seen within the recommended time. We rank as number eight—
Members interjecting—
MR MULCAHY: Mr Speaker, I know that it is terribly painful to have this put on the public record, but the fact of the matter is that we rank number eight in percentage of admissions that waited longer than one year and number eight in terms of the median waiting time for elective surgery. We rank number eight in terms of the percentage that were seen within the recommended time within the emergency department and number eight in terms of the median waiting time for the emergency department.
I do not quite understand what the minister does not get from those figures and I am still waiting to hear her provide some explanation of the poor report in the report that has been produced this year. This is not something we are dredging through from years ago. This is current data. This minister says, “What problems are there? I do not know of any problems.” Well, maybe the minister needs to get her head around some of these figures and come up with some explanation as to why the job is done poorly.
Sometimes people can come up with ideas other than your own that will in fact improve things. On this occasion I suggest that the federal government and my colleague, with her bill, have put forward an idea that will in fact lead to improvements in our public hospitals. The ACT sadly has done worse than nothing and has instead dismantled the previous system of hospital boards within the ACT that allowed decisions to remain close to those affected. The ACT government has centralised power through an unwieldy chain of command that leads to the minister’s office where solutions to the problems have been sorely lacking. I think that is central to the minister’s reluctance to concede that things have been handled badly.
The problems are not simply the result of a lack of money. They are the results of poor management. I made that point last week. When you look at the comparative data with other jurisdictions, money is not the sole answer to this problem. There are issues of management. The Chief Minister conceded—
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