Page 4405 - Week 12 - Thursday, 26 October 2017
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past year. It is also an honour and privilege to be minister in areas that deliver services that tens of thousands of Canberrans use every day. It has been an exciting and fascinating challenge.
The task was made a little less daunting by the fact that this Barr Labor government went to the last election with a clear set of commitments in the health, transport, higher education and city services portfolios to ensure that our growing city not only meets the challenges ahead of us but seizes the opportunities available to our unique city. We also collectively share a strong vision for how to make the services Canberrans rely on even better. The job of my team and our directorates over the past 12 months has been to roll up our sleeves and start getting on with delivering those commitments. And we have been. I would like to spend a few minutes talking about the big things we have delivered in each of my portfolios because there is real progress being made and Canberrans are already seeing some of the benefits.
The government went to the last election with some big commitments in health: to increase Canberrans’ access to walk-in centres and GP bulk-billing, expand the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children, build the new SPIRE Centre at the Canberra Hospital and invest in more front-line services. We made it a priority to fund work on all these initiatives in the first post-election budget so that delivery can get underway. Projects like SPIRE and the Centenary hospital expansion are big capital projects that will take some years yet to rise out of the ground, but by starting the planning work as early as possible in this term of government we are making sure this new health infrastructure will be ready when our growing population needs it.
During the past year we have also seen the University of Canberra public hospital make rapid progress towards its commissioning in 2018, which will give Canberra a dedicated rehabilitation hospital while also providing a world-class training facility for our future health workforce. Importantly too, we have begun consultation with clinical practitioners and the community about the draft territory-wide health services framework which will inform the strategic direction for ACT Health’s clinical and community-based health services over the next 10 years. It is no good making huge investments in health infrastructure if these are not based on a proper understanding of how Canberrans need and want to access health services and a clear plan for delivering them in a way that can meet those needs.
We have also seen a particularly busy and challenging year on a number of issues for which I am grateful for ACT Health’s swift and proactive response—notably among them the system-wide data review. This is an important piece of work and is progressing very well. ACT Health responded quickly and professionally to the challenges exposed by the Grenfell Tower disaster and moved quickly to provide robust advice on managing the issue, with the safety of our community forefront in its mind.
We also know that the 2017 flu season impacted so many Canberrans and their families, and of course the health workforce itself is not immune to the flu season. I recognise that it has been a challenging year and thank all those involved in making sure that we provide the best possible health services to those people in our care. I also acknowledge that this season we have seen families across Canberra impacted by
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