Page 1147 - Week 03 - Thursday, 31 March 2011

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However, as I have stated in committee meetings, I have not been satisfied that the committee has been presented with all the evidence from the government or with sufficient evidence that would justify the committee from discounting or recommending in favour of any of the remaining options. Without clarity on the issue of where a third public hospital would be built, evidence of the ability to staff all of the options, evidence of any cost efficiencies of a networked system and without some of the evidence and analysis that the government has refused to provide to the committee, I believe that all of the three remaining government options—A, D and E—have a balance of relative strengths and weaknesses that have been articulated in the report and at this stage, with the government still conducting community consultations, should not be discounted.

MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (10.09): I would just like to speak to the report as a member of the health committee. I too would like to thank the other committee members—the chair, Mr Doszpot, and Ms Porter—and also, obviously, the committee secretary, Grace Concannon, for her hard work once again in bringing together what was quite a lot of evidence which we had heard during the hearings and also from submissions. We also needed to incorporate the information with the government’s options paper which came later in the process and then go through those options. I believe we had information, submissions and evidence from various parties which very much fitted in with those options and also the original remit of the committee’s terms of reference. I would also like to thank the staff at both Calvary and Canberra hospitals for hosting the committee in tours of both hospitals, which were very informative to the committee during those processes.

The most important issue for me personally in the inquiry was to ask: what is going to be in the best interests of the ACT community and their future health needs? I would hope that all parties with an interest and a stake in health services would also have this at the centre of what they are thinking and what they do. I would like to outline what I believe are some of the key issues that we must consider. All of them were actually discussed at the hearings and have been noted in the report which is being tabled today. One of them relates to having consistent practices between the ACT’s hospitals. This includes staffing issues, hospital procedures, communication processes and the technology which is used—and that includes communication technology. These are some of the issues that were raised by groups, including the ANF and staff at TCH, and they go to the importance of having a fully networked hospital and the efficiencies that it can gain.

Issues around infection control were also raised. In particular, Dr Peter Collignon, who is a specialist in this area, noted that hospital design is now very much focused on constructing primarily single rooms due to infection control and that older hospitals, such as Calvary and also parts of TCH, have primarily shared rooms. While shared rooms will still be a part of future hospital design, it was noted that most hospitals will have single rooms due to the importance of maintaining infection control. This was noted during the committee’s TCH visit, where we were informed that the design at TCH will be around about 80 per cent single rooms. That is quite significant. This is important in considering, I think, the future design and cost of construction of new acute beds and where they will be located.


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