Page 2181 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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record levels under your government of the hospital system going on bypass. You only need to talk to the ambulance drivers to know that the turnaround times are not working. If you want to really know what is going on, go out and talk to the real people who are sick of the system that you preside over.
You can say that we have the biggest health spend. The health spend goes up every year. Of course you have got the biggest health spend—it is seven years on since we left office—but have you got a more effective health system? The answer is no, you have not. Indeed, on your own latest figures, the waiting times in Canberra’s emergency departments increased for all but category 1. The government says there has been improvement in waiting times as compared to the same time last year. In fact, the reality is that all the trend lines are down for the preceding quarter.
It is disturbing to know that up to 55 per cent of the patients rated as urgent and 54 per cent of those rated as semi-urgent were seen and treated within the stipulated times, 30 minutes and 60 minutes respectively. Again, what you have in this budget is a typical, big spending budget. They throw money at problems because they think people are fooled by this. They are not fooled by this. What you are doing is spending more and you are delivering less, and you are delivering it less effectively.
Some of the projects that we started back in 2000 still have not been finalised or finished. The single patient identifier number program has not been finished. If you want real efficiency in the system, you have got to go back to the front line and ask them what works. The minister was so proud of her health plan that she waved the little document around. Nobody in the opposition was aware of that document until it appeared suddenly, halfway through the estimates process. That is how proud the government is of the plan. It was not in any of the budget boxes; it was not delivered with any of the documents that came to the opposition.
Maybe it was just a mistake that the only people who did not get documents were members of the opposition, and that was an accident. They accidentally forgot! They failed to honour their commitment to deliver the budget boxes at an appropriate time—getting documents from the government at 4.57 on a Friday afternoon. That is the problem—people are sick of the sad, cynical attitude. What they want is a little bit more honesty, openness and accountability. Instead, what we have got is an additional bureaucracy that is stifling what the staff want to deliver.
We then get problems in the hospital where there are worksites where patients who have had operations are lying under a layer of dust, where naked flames are used in a hospital corridor, where nurses are stepping over extension cords in a worksite in an acute care ward. The minister says that it really was not that bad. That is the hospital system you are presiding over. That is the hospital system that people know; it is the hospital system that people talk about.
The care provided by the staff—the nurses, the doctors, the other allied health workers—deserves recognition. The staff deserve congratulations on the care that they deliver in the most arduous of circumstances. They have no faith in the leadership, either through the department or in the minister, because all they hear about is how much money they have been thrown and how beds are shuffled from one area to the next area; where we create and re-create; where we paint and repaint. The sad reality
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