Page 2683 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 10 August 2016
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There’s a very rapidly closing window of opportunity. The current facilities are only just holding and if you delay this sort of infrastructure any longer it may well mean the wheels will come off the cart and the hospital won’t cope ... The hospital is at breaking point.
I am very encouraged that that is the view of the AMA. I know that when I spoke to the president of the AMA about his comments he said that they reflected the views of the members that he had spoken to; as I understand it, a number of clinicians who work within the system. He says about the hospital and about the current facilities, “It is old, poorly designed and very, very difficult to work with.” He is also quoted as saying:
It was ‘dangerous and terrible’ for patients, who had to share lifts with visitors and others as they were wheeled around.
In terms of the forward design and all the work that we have put into this, he said:
It’s a hospital that will just revolutionalise care, and make it a much, much improved place for patients … It’s taking a 1960s relic and bringing it up to match what’s going on in other hospitals.
He said that much work had gone into Labor’s design and that there was “a great deal of disappointment” when it had not gone ahead. I repeat: there was a great deal of disappointment when it had not gone ahead. Certainly, that is the response that we have got from people who would be, I think, traditional Labor supporters, people for whom health and education are core Labor values. They were staggered, were shocked, were disappointed when, after all the work that had been done, all the case had been made to say that we need to improve our hospital, not just incrementally, not just by managing extreme and high risk, but a significant enhancement for the next decade and more—long-term thinking—Labor pulled the pin on that and went with the Greens’ pressure on the tram.
I am sure the Greens are laughing all the way on this. They have got what they wanted out of this. The Greens member has been a very loyal member of the Labor cabinet, as Mr Stanhope described him, because he got what he wanted, which is a tram but the problem is that fundamentally it is the people of Canberra who will pay for this if the Greens get their way because they will get a tram and they will not get the sort of health system that they deserve.
In my remaining time I want to note that it is important we do not focus just on the bricks and mortar, although this will be a massive expansion, a massive renewal. Ultimately it is the people within a health system who make it good or make it bad. What I would say is that we have some of the best people in our health system in the world.
One of my greatest pleasures of being an MLA is going to the graduation of the young doctors at the end of every year and seeing some of the smartest, most energetic, most dedicated people that you could ever wish to meet who are then in the main coming into our health system to work in our health system to take care of us.
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