Page 1563 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 31 March 2009
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MS GALLAGHER: I thank Ms Hunter for the question. I do have the details of that; I just don’t have them on my person. With respect to the number that I have seen recently, if we exclude elderly nursing home type patients from this number, and if we are looking at people who are generally under the age of 60, from the briefing provided to me I think it is six. The cost of providing care packages for those individuals in the community equals about $3.3 million a year. The length of time varies, the age varies from quite young to mid-50s and the reasons they are in hospital vary as well. I will check the actual number; it is either six or eight. But that does exclude nursing home type patients. If they are eligible for a nursing home placement and we cannot find one, they are in the hospital as well.
MR SPEAKER: Ms Hunter, a supplementary question?
MS HUNTER: Minister, why is there no whole-of-government approach to ensure people living with disability can access seamless support across ACT government services?
MS GALLAGHER: There is a whole-of-government strategy. Primarily, the lead agencies are ACT Health and Disability, Housing and Community Services. One of the challenges is in relation to the financial supports, and also appropriate accommodation and what the individual person’s requirements and desires are. It is actually a very complex piece of work. I know that even up to very senior executives meet to discuss individual patients, to see whether there is the opportunity to move them into the disability support system, but it is not always black and white.
We do work very hard to free up those places in hospital. We acknowledge that hospital is not the right place in which individuals should spend long periods of time after their acute illness has been dealt with. But short of giving a blank cheque to disability, which is not the current way that we fund disability, to provide additional support over and above what they are budget funded to do—in some cases some of the care requirements are well in excess of $150,000 a year. For the individuals that are currently awaiting appropriate placement, the cost is $3.3 million.
This is an issue that we juggle and struggle with throughout budget cycles. Those agencies are not working in silos; they are working together. But if there is an appropriate place in the community, if the support packages are not there and being funded, it makes it impossible, unless somebody leaves the disability system or passes away in it, to free up resources.
We have injected huge amounts of money into disability services, and any government will continue to need to do that. Also, we have had some additional funding from the commonwealth—not as much as we would like, but certainly there has been some matching of that money in the CSTDA. That went a long way to meeting unmet need in the community, but it has not gone to delivering for all of the need in the community, which is something that the government continues to struggle with and consider in the context of the budgets.
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