Page 3056 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 September 2014
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larger cities. You will see they are not performing as well as Canberra Hospital is, or Calvary is, on timeliness. Do you know why? Because they are busy, major metropolitan hospitals seeing hundreds of thousands of people requiring complex treatment, and usually they are a referral centre for a region which has a whole new layer of patient load placed on it. We have every reason to be proud of our health system. It is under pressure. The planning work is being done and it is a priority for this government.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.03): I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak about this today. It has been an interesting debate so far. I thought we might hear from Mr Smyth about some of the priorities of the Liberal Party but, in fact, we heard a long list of his complaints. I would have been interested to see what the alternative vision of the hospital system was—or the health system, in fact—but we were not to be enlightened in that regard today.
In terms of the Greens’ views on health and what health means to us, I am certainly keen to talk about that today. ACT Health is a massive portfolio, but what is bigger is the word “health” itself. If you actually look at the World Health Organisation’s definition of “health”, it describes it as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.
When you look at that kind of definition, how does the government exactly quantify that and quantify its priorities based on that all-encompassing notion? Is it the growing and concerning incidences of obesity and all the health complications that are being presented as a result of poor lifestyle choices and increasingly sedentary lives? Is it the alarmingly high presentations of mental health and the growing complexity of vulnerable people’s needs?
Is it the many preventable illnesses, such as sexually transmitted diseases and blood-borne viruses, the most treatable conditions such as diabetes or asthma, the wide-ranging complexities of the ageing population or the dental care that many financially vulnerable Canberrans simply cannot afford? These are not purely rhetorical questions. These are the very real concerns the world over that governments need to prioritise in terms of both expenditure and policy directions in response to the very many issues that arise in our community in terms of public health.
Governments demonstrate their efforts in addressing these competing needs through many different responses—health promotion activities, prevention programs, targeted early intervention approaches, mainstream and generalist healthcare agencies, inpatient and outpatient hospital care and, of course, emergency medicine departments and ambulance services. That gives us an army of policy officers, doctors, nurses and other allied health professionals out there in the community every day working hard to address our community’s health needs in a way that most of us, thankfully, will never see or understand.
It is not just the health of those that are called patients, clients or consumers that government needs to consider. Of course, we need to take into account the health of health staff and other employees, as we discussed in this place last week. It is not just
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