Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My congratulations to my friend and colleague the member for Flinders and others who have just spoken on the very important area of ovarian cancer. It is an interesting segue into what I would like to grieve about tonight on behalf of my local community which is to do with health services in the greater Frankston and Mornington Peninsula area. We, as a community, have much pride in and much support for our hospital and health services on the peninsula. Just a week and a half ago there was a wonderful tribute to the many hundreds of volunteers who work in partnership with our health and hospital services to ensure that they support the needs of our community. It was an honour to be there and to see so many committed people giving selflessly of their time. I only wish that level of selflessness and commitment which volunteers display to our health and hospital system was matched by support from state government.

I stand here tonight having shaken my head on reading the Herald Sun report of the findings from the state government’s health system assessment. It gives an account of how our hospital system is travelling in Victoria. In the Herald Sun of 14 May, Grant McArthur wrote the headline ‘Patients needing treatment being forced to wait longer’. If that is not enough concern for Victorians in general, the more troubling feature of that article was the very clear message it conveyed about Frankston Hospital.

I am a great admirer of Frankston Hospital and the very many dedicated professionals at work in that facility and within the Peninsula Health service generally. The thing that is letting them down though is the lack of resources and this is borne out very clearly in this state government report, which interestingly the journalist pointed out was let loose just at the same time all the news of the federal budget was being circulated. I know even at a local level, people reported on how interesting it was that the timing of that report coincided with the budget news. Frankston Hospital was featured in the Herald Sun. The article said:

Frankston hospital patients suffered most: two out of five category two and three emergency cases endured prolonged waits.

The article went on to talk about extended waiting times for elective surgery. This was a theme that was picked up in the local papers as well with a very succinct and crisp article from Mike Morris describing our hospital as being on the critical list. He went through the Victorian government’s Your hospitals report—July 2007 to December 2007 and highlighted the increasing number of people waiting for elective surgery and the impact of high levels of demand on an underresourced emergency department at the Frankston Hospital.

The issues are quite compelling; they have been with us some time. For those that are not familiar with the greater Frankston and Mornington Peninsula area we can only head largely in a northerly direction, so whereas other communities in the greater Melbourne metropolitan area might have other alternatives we are a peninsula and much of our region is surrounded by the bays and Bass Strait. So we do not have too many other options, we have to go towards the north and the north east to secure the services that we want.

It is an area of growing population. This is reflected in the number of people seeking assistance through our hospital facilities. It is reflected in the decision to open an accident and emergency facility in my friend and colleague the member for Flinders electorate at Rosebud. The growth there is about 15 per cent a year, I understand, on top of the enormous growth through Frankston as a regional centre providing for the health needs of hundreds of thousands of Victorians. The thing that is most troubling is that despite those known demands on the hospital, increasing demands, increasing patient throughput, and an increasing number of people waiting for elective surgeries, the Rudd government is actually adding to those current challenges that stretch the very committed and talented doctors, nurses and health administrators with even more challenges.

Increasingly, privately insured patients are seen as attractive to public hospitals, as a way of bringing more resources into those hospitals. Notwithstanding the fact it displaces a public patient on a waiting list, it is a drive to bring in those additional private health insurance resources. We have seen that private health insurance framework being undermined by the Rudd government with its decision on the Medicare levy surcharge for people who are in a position to consider private health. The reduction in the number of people in private health will have price impacts on those who remain in it. And, more particularly, it will simply displace demand out of the private health system onto the already stretched public hospital system. The Howard government recognised that a strong health system in Australia needed a good balance between public and private health and the early signs of the Rudd government in undermining that balance and putting ever-increasing demands on the public hospital system are very troubling.

My local community is troubled by the outer metropolitan doctors initiatives. Increasingly, medical practice representatives are coming to me and saying, ‘Bruce, when your crowd was in government we could make our case for a desire to bring a doctor to our area to cope with the growing demands.’ Now, with some chagrin, they are pointing out that this is becoming increasingly difficult and they are not at all optimistic that the gains we made in doctor-to-patient ratios under those Howard government initiatives will continue into the future. The Howard government also put funding into the after-hours GP medicentre that operates in collaboration with the accident and emergency area, again, trying to relieve the pressure on that accident and emergency area. We are uncertain about what will happen with those incentives that have seen bulk-billing numbers increase. Thankfully, the MRI technology, with Medicare funded treatment on referral from a specialist—another initiative of the Howard government—is helping quite significantly. We have seen the private health industry supplement our resources with outstanding facilities, such as the Bays Hospital, the Beleura Private Hospital, the Peninsula Private and, more recently, Frankston Private Hospital offering an outstanding range of oncology services.

The member for Flinders has previously outlined how the state government’s inability, along with the Rudd government’s inability, to address the closure of Warley Hospital on Phillip Island will put an even greater strain on those health resources. These are troubling times. We have increasing demand; all the statistics show that. I have been impressed by the way the Frankston Hospital team have adapted to demanding challenges. Just recently I was briefed on the way in which the triage system in the accident and emergency area is providing a more constant and regular level of clinical observation so that the assessments on clinical need and priority can be updated by an experienced professional in the waiting room, observing the health status of people who are there.

Many people in my community remember back to August 2006 when, in the face of these extra challenges, a photo of the state health minister, Bronwyn Pike, appeared in our local papers, in which she was claiming great credit for expanding the waiting rooms. That is fine and it is nice that there is more comfort in the waiting room, but the issue is getting people through so that they get the medical treatment that they deserve.

These challenges amount to the perfect storm of health challenges for our community—growing demand, and government policy at a state and federal level not recognising that these actions individually may not seem much but they are coming together to place even greater demand on the health system and services in our region. I looked to the state Labor members of parliament to do something, to say something but, as so often is the case, particularly with the member for Frankston, who presents himself as the Labor state member for Frankston, never a truer word has been said. He is certainly not there representing Frankston; he is certainly there representing the Labor Party. He needs to find his voice. We have this perfect storm coming and Dr Alistair Harkness represents the silence before the storm. He really needs to be heard so that we can attract some of these additional resources to our community. It is too important just to sit back and do bits and pieces, such as extend the waiting room, and to get encouraging news in the recent state government budget about extra paramedic support and ambulance support. All of that is terrific, but those critical health professionals need to have a destination where they can provide for the health care of the people whom they are sent out to collect. This is really the challenge that we face. The Howard government, before the last election, had some terrific ideas about health. I thought the local management of hospitals was an exceptionally good one for our case.

Our health services needed a very strong voice. Our local hospitals needed to be able to make the case on behalf of our hospital and demand the resources that are needed to respond to the increasing challenges and demands being placed on it, not be sort of cajoled, squashed and turned into a licorice allsort through some Spring Street bureaucracy who might have some idea of what they would like to see happen but are not sufficiently moved and motivated by what actually is happening.

We need some help in our community to support those outstanding doctors, nurses, health professionals and health administrators who, I think, are having a really red-hot go, making the best of the resources that are available to them. The key is that there are not enough resources. Our population continues to grow, the demands on our hospitals continue to grow and the Rudd government is implementing policies that will make that demand so much more critical and demanding. (Time expired)