Page 3061 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
When you lose staff in the short term what happens is that, as you try to catch up—as we are now—in terms of retention, recruitment and training, you spend a lot more in the long term. We just need to see what that wage restraint actually means.
I now move on to the cost of health. There has been a six per cent commitment from the government to health expenditure. That is certainly welcomed. Health expenditure seems to be going up every year. It seems to be tracking at about nine per cent at the moment. There is a delta between the amount put forward by the ACT government—and that delta, as I understand it, is basically filled up by various grants and other programs supplied by the federal government. We are a little bit dependent and it is obviously an area of concern that needs to be addressed so that, as we plan for our long-term health requirements, we have a guaranteed line of funding. I am not sure how we do that, but certainly it is an area that we need to consider for the future.
The budget puts some emphasis on primary and preventive health care and contains some lines of funding, but there are some lines in and lines out so that the net amount is not significant. I urge the government to consider more in the areas of prevention, early intervention and detection. There are some worrying statistics emerging from the AIHW that we saw recently, and I quote:
… the concept of an available bed is also becoming less important, particularly in the light of increasing same-day hospitalisations and the provision of hospital-in-the-home care.
I know that the government has some provision for hospital-in-the-home and has allocated some money. It is a scheme that I think is worthy. There are some other schemes that the government put in, such as step up, step down, which are also worthy. I would like to see further consideration of this area and a trend away from what we see now, which are massive amounts of money and focus being put into capital infrastructure. We need to look at more innovative ways of delivering health care in the community. We need to make sure that the tertiary end is not where we are delivering all of our health. It is not the best area; it is not the safest area in terms of infections and so on. It is not the best from a therapeutic point of view and it is also significantly more expensive.
Ninety million dollars has been allocated for e-health. There is a need for e-health and I welcome e-health funding. We need to make sure that we are ahead of the game. To be honest, I have not yet seen the detail of how that money is going to be spent; it has not been given to us. Is $90 million the right amount? We will have to see. I would not want more money being spent than necessary, but if we can demonstrate that that would provide the efficiencies in our health care we welcome it. But we wait to see the detail on how that will be rolled out. We will keep a particular focus on that.
Mental health funding, as I alluded to before, is about 7.7 per cent, but we know that we need to start spending more on mental health. At the moment we have an aspirational target of 12 per cent but no plan of how we are going to get there. Something that we need to address is this: when you have an aspirational target you also need to have a plan of how you are going to get to that target, otherwise it really does not mean anything. If we are just told, “Yes, we’d like to get there some time in the future,” it does not give us what we need.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .