Page 2555 - Week 08 - Thursday, 14 August 2014
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promised to be opened two years ago for $11 million and now the government is having to actually make new rules, make new laws, specifically focused on that project. There is the bush healing farm, Madam Speaker, and the ongoing delays and issues associated with that.
The women’s and children’s hospital is now open, and I have been out and had a look, and certainly it is delivering a good service to women, but the problem is the capacity issues there. As we know, the capacity issues have led to women delivering babies and then essentially being forced out after four to six hours, and that is unacceptable. When you track back—we have not really got time to do it today—and you look at the reasons for that, it is because of the changes at the federal government level under the federal Labor Party and the change to the rules regarding Medicare rebates that led to a big influx into the public system, and the public system here broke.
It is also because the government ignored the ANF and others when they said that this model of care will not work. The government went ahead anyway, ignoring that advice, and it was the young mothers and their infants in Canberra who paid the price for ignoring that advice.
The hospital car park, Madam Speaker, we will recall blew out from $29 million to $45 million. We saw the extensive delays and the massive disruption to staff and patients. We have been putting pressure on this government to deal with elective surgery, and we still see that we have the longest waiting time for elective surgery in the nation.
There are ongoing problems with communication with patients. We have seen systemic bullying and workplace culture issues, and I again call on the government to release the workplace surveys. It is immensely frustrating to me that they will not do so. We saw the bullying in TCH obstetrics and the data doctoring from 2012.
What I would like to do now is to talk about the emergency departments in more detail. There is no question that we have a problem in our emergency department here at TCH, and this has been the subject of extensive debate in this place. We have had motions. I have tried to refer this matter for inquiry by the health committee, I have tried to refer it for an inquiry by the Auditor-General, and at every step of the way the government refused to have that occur.
The only Auditor-General’s review that has been provided was when the data was being fabricated, and what we had was data being pushed out by the ACT government that was proved to be false and that was covering up the problems there at the ED. And as a result of that, as a result of that by the Health Minister’s own admission, that has exacerbated the problem, because health planners thought that things were good, things were on the improve, when they were anything but. And we had two or three years of missed opportunity. And what that missed opportunity means is that hundreds, in fact thousands, of Canberrans have waited longer in ED than they ever should have.
So because someone at a senior level in the health system made the decision that they were going to fabricate the data, people are now waiting in ED in Canberra longer than they should, in pain, and, as the Medical Journal of Australia makes quite clear,
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