Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship and Settlement) Share this | Hansard source

The National Health and Hospitals Network Bill 2010 is the first step to enact the flawed Rudd health reforms. It establishes the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, currently part of the health department, as a permanent independent statutory authority.

It was intended that this act would be amended in the future to include provisions to establish the Independent Hospital Pricing Authority; however the flexibility that was to be built in for future changes that may be needed was scrapped just shortly after it was announced. This highlights that this important reform was driven by political agenda and not good policy outcome.

Any plan that increases bureaucracies and ties up hospitals even further with complicated processes in the delivery of health care to Australians is fundamentally flawed. Let me put on the record that I speak from experience having seen the atrocious mistakes of the Queensland Labor government in this particular area of health. To implement a health plan that does not give a guarantee that more dollars will arrive at the bedside for the benefit of patients and healthcare workers is bad public policy.

The coalition does support an ongoing role for the commission within existing arrangements, but we hold serious concerns about this government’s and the previous government’s desire to rearrange the bureaucratic structures of departments. These changes will not be efficient and Labor’s record shows that its supposed health reform agenda will not even be effectively implemented.

The aims of this commission are very broad, long of ideals but short on specifics. It is very interesting when reading the bill that more pages are concerned with how the structure will be set up and the role of members than the processes under which it will work. The commission’s aim to reduce harm caused by preventable errors, to reduce health care costs and to ensure the appropriateness of services is quite grand, but it is also impractical given the pending changes. With the proposed changes it will be all things to all departments and will prove not to be the most effective means to ensure positive and effective outcomes for patients. Well-staffed, well-resourced and well-supported bed-side care providers will be the best way forward in providing safe and quality care, not a faceless bureaucracy in Canberra that sits outside the Department of Health and Ageing.

Just as the medical fraternity assesses efficacy by measuring patient outcomes, this plan offers no efficacy measures. The coalition’s beds and boards policy would make a real difference by directly tying increased funding to the delivery of increased services. This policy is in step with the medical fraternity’s measures of efficiency through patient outcomes. In contrast, this plan increases the bureaucratic processes and has done little to demonstrate that it will achieve better care for patients and more support for our healthcare workers. Under this plan we will see a return of Labor’s wasteful spending and inefficient program delivery. Simply shifting funding by dubious means as a dominant funder will only result in unnecessary duplication of processes and structures.

Brisbane does not have a superclinic. I speak to many of the medical practitioners who tell me that they can build 10 GP superclinics for what it costs to build one superclinic. Brisbane does have, however, one of the world’s leading hospitals in the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. The doctors and nurses in Brisbane that I have spoken to speak very highly of this hospital and they tell me the fundamental reason why it remains a world class hospital is that it is self-managed. This hospital makes local decisions in the interests of its patients, not decisions by some accountants and officials that run from head office in Canberra some 1,000 kilometres away. To expand on the success of the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, each major referral hospital and its associated hospitals should have its own management board.

On a side note, when the former Prime Minister and member for Griffith was the Director General of Queensland—the chief bureaucrat to which the title is still quite fitting—he removed local hospital boards and reduced the number of beds. The two things this National Health and Hospitals Network Bill tries to do is to implement local boards and increase the number of beds. This is not reform; this is simply Labor covering up Labor’s own mess.

The coalition has a plan to establish a $150 million fund to assist nurses pursuing important professional development opportunities. This underlines the coalition’s support of clinical best practice in our health and hospitals systems. Nurses tell me such a funding proposal would go a very long way to help provide them with up-to-date quality and respectful care at the bedside.

I have recently seen what a fantastic job nurses do in various hospitals in Brisbane and I congratulate and thank them for their patient care. One need only look at the nurses’ payroll debacle in Queensland Health to see how badly a Labor government delivers for nurses and how little support they give nurses. Labor has failed hospital based nurses. It got so bad in my home state of Queensland that the current ALP National President and Labor Premier, Anna Bligh, basically told nurses to turn to charity when they were not being paid by Queensland Health. The debacle is still going on due to the severity of the Queensland Labor government’s failure. It is a disgrace.

The coalition’s plan to establish 20 early psychosis intervention centres and 800 beds for acute and subacute care is aimed at providing targeted health care and early prevention and intervention. Our proposal to provide an additional 60 headspace sites, providing a one-stop shop for Australians and young people with information and services relating to general health and wellbeing, and mental health and drug and alcohol services was very well received in Brisbane. At a recent AGM of the Mental Illness Fellowship of Queensland in New Farm it was put to the meeting by Professor Mendoza that the coalition’s mental health policy was the most significant advance in mental health planning. In the electorate of Brisbane this was one of the most widely acclaimed policies of the coalition at the last election. I had GPs and nurses alike tell me the great importance of this policy. This is real health care reform and this is a real plan.

A current plan afoot in Brisbane to close down the Royal Children’s Hospital is evidence of the reckless and wasteful approach to health care. The member for Port Adelaide, when he was Parliamentary Secretary for Health to the Minister for Health and Ageing, Ms Roxon, reaffirmed the Commonwealth’s commitment to a policy of non-closure of existing hospitals and support for state decisions. The Commonwealth has always assumed that these decisions are based on a process of state-wide consultation, but in true Labor style we have not seen state-wide transparent consultation over the decision to close the Royal Children’s Hospital. In recent polling on the issue, 84 per cent of respondents were unaware of the closure and 90 per cent were opposed to it. Maintaining the Royal Children’s Hospital and the strength of a well-functioning Herston teaching hospital within the medical school complex is very important to the people of Brisbane.

Reckless spending and the proven inability to deliver programs under Labor means more reckless spending and its economic failures mean that funding for essential services is under threat from this plan. The coalition supports the work that is being done, and can continue to be done, by the Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care but we hold serious concerns about this government’s desire to establish a new standalone, self-serving bureaucracy that will move even further away from the patients they were designed to protect.

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