Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

You need to visit a hospital, Sir, and see that 30 per cent of those medical wards are blocked by seniors who simply cannot find a bed in an aged care facility. That situation is worse than it was five years ago. The bed block is worse because the funding for aged care beds is simply not being taken up. That is because the infrastructure payments are insufficient to build, fund and maintain these places for our seniors.

Without taking our eye off the ball, we know that safety and quality is probably the highest goal of a health system after access. Safety and quality is the true measure of whether we are committed to building a better health system, because it is one thing to be accessible and it is another thing to have well-trained clinicians working inside impressive buildings; but, ultimately, without safety and quality, we will have the situation where the wrong drips are put up, the wrong tablets are prescribed or, as many of us will remember in clinical situations, the patient walks in with a great big bag of glasses and says, ‘Doctor, none of these work.’ It is at that moment that you realise that thousands of dollars have been spent without a single improvement in the health of your patients. This legislation is a noble goal. There is no disputing that we need an authority. One was set up by a Howard government commission and it achieved great things but it is no substitute for having no action on the delivery of services for Australians around this nation.

See this speech in context