Page 1272 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 March 2013
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they cannot fund it. So what do we do? We take the easy option. That is what this Chief Minister is doing. She said, “What we will do?” To quote her, “It will be easier to have more beds go to Calvary and the northside hospital before we focus on working on areas of core services at a tertiary hospital.” So we are going to abandon core services for the easy option. The only problem with easy options is that they easily fall over and they easily lead to less desirable outcomes.
If the government had done its work and had done its work properly, we would not be in this position. We know that they are not interested in scrutiny, because when we tried to get the Auditor-General to look at the emergency department, we were told, “No, we have got a plan. We will table the plan.” Now I see the plan, it looks a lot like more of the transformational reforms that we had over the last decade.
Remember that in 2002 we had the Reid report. We have been reforming this system for 11 years. If the system is as good as the health minister says it is, why have we had nothing but plan after plan? I cannot even keep count of them. We have had the emergency access plan 2013-17. I cannot even keep count of how many plans we have had to improve access, because there have been so many, and they have failed. The only thing that genuinely keeps the system afloat is the hard work of the doctors, the nurses, the allied health professionals and the other staff who work hard and work with the best of their ability in a system that is letting everyone down.
We know that the ED has the worst emergency department wait times in the country. I think the most damning indictment was that the Auditor-General found that the Canberra Hospital’s emergency performance had declined over the last 10 years under Labor. It had declined. Ten years of transformational plans, and they led to decline. We have had incident after incident. We have had allegations of bullying. We have had data tampering in that time. Is it any wonder that people are frustrated? Is it any wonder that we have to raise these matters of public importance in the way that we have.
Yes, they may have become stump speeches. But I tell you what: there is a forest of stumps out there as plan after plan collapses and we have a Chief Minister and a health minister who is unable to answer the questions about when the system will get better. The problem that we have now is that the government has frozen the $41 million budgeted for the design work of a new block to replace the 10-storey tower at the Canberra Hospital, the so-called $800 million heart of the Canberra Hospital. If the heart of the Canberra Hospital’s renewal is at risk, what does that mean for the tertiary health centre for this territory? What does it mean for those who go there seeking care?
Remember that they have done all this work over a number of years. This is not just something that popped up. They have spent millions of dollars on this work. But suddenly the excuses are now that it might be more appropriate for the government to be expanding services at Calvary hospital. Would you not have looked at that option in the first place? Are we seriously hearing from the Chief Minister that they did not consider that in the first place? That is what it sounds like.
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