Page 3052 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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composition of what is going to comprise these new hospitals. If I can go back to some work that was done in the Calvary inquiry, there was a question asked by the chair of the health committee:
And the mix of acute and subacute beds was part of the same calculation?
This was in relation to what comprised the 400 beds. The minister answered at that point:
That was part of that work. Within beds, I guess, you have your subacute beds, you have your acute beds and around that you have a level of higher capacity beds—intensive care and high dependency beds. All of that has been looked at unit by unit …
I will say that again:
All of that has been looked at unit by unit across Health. It is a component of cancer beds, renal capacity—I think they are increasingly using chairs in renal. We have gone to each unit, in a sense, to try and predict what the level of bed needs will be.
So the minister certainly gave the impression that some very detailed work had been done bed by bed on what comprised that 400. Indeed that went to the point of the questioning in the Calvary inquiry. I asked:
The options paper defines that as a number and it talks about the number of subacute versus acute. You were talking about the fact that you have actually refined that in more detail down to renal beds, high dependency beds and a whole bunch of bed categories …
et cetera, et cetera, and then I said:
Could you provide that to the committee please?
The minister said at that stage:
I think at the moment it is subject to cabinet processes. In a way, I have tried to deal with that …
And so on. I then asked for some more detail around the 400 beds and Ms Gallagher said:
We have done the analysis. I have not just said that we have done it; we have done it.
Further:
At the moment we are going through budget cabinet and a lot of that information is subject to budget cabinet processes. I think it is fair to allow the cabinet to consider that.
So we went on with a fairly lengthy discussion about the fact that the government had done a lot of analysis, that they had worked out what that 400 comprised and they had
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