Damian Hale (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to inform the House of a major event that occurred in my electorate on Friday, 22 January. It was the official opening of the radiation oncology facility in Darwin, which will be known as the Alan Walker Cancer Care Unit. The facility means that cancer patients in the Northern Territory will no longer have to travel to Adelaide to undertake their radiation treatment. I had great pleasure in officially opening this facility with the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. The facility was funded by the federal government to the tune of $27.8 million.

The first of two state-of-the-art linear accelerator machines for the unit has been installed and is currently undergoing preparations for precision use. The facility is expected to start taking appointments in March, with the first patients to use the facility in April. The facility has capacity for two linear accelerator bunkers, a treatment area for patients, clinic facilities for patient consultations and examinations, office and support facilities, and access to car parking. The Northern Territory Minister for Health, Kon Vatskalis, said the Northern Territory government was also pleased to provide some funding for a small chemotherapy ward at the same site. An agreement with Royal Adelaide Hospital will ensure specialist radiation staff, including radiation oncologists and registrars, are available to staff the facility.

I spoke to Helen Smith, who is Chief Executive Officer of the Cancer Council of the Northern Territory, and is a cancer survivor herself, about what this unit means to people in the Northern Territory and in particular in my electorate of Solomon. They can now stay at home for treatment. They can continue working, which is often a fantastic thing for people who are suffering from cancer—that they can continue to work while receiving treatment and support in their home city, Darwin or Palmerston. They have got their friends and family there for support as well.

It was amazing that, during the construction, there were often debates on local radio and in other media about whether or not we would be able to staff such a facility. But, through the support of Royal Adelaide Hospital, we have been able to do that. We already have eight staff and there are two physicists on board as well. Because it is such a state of the art facility—it is of world standard—we are having people wanting to work in the facility and signing up for three-year contracts.

I have also spoken to the wife of Keith Williams. Keith is the coordinator of the prostate cancer support group and a cancer survivor himself. I spoke to his wife, Pat, last night about what it meant to Keith to have this facility. It is just amazing what this will mean to the Northern Territory. For so long we have had people who have refused to leave Darwin, or the Palmerston area, or Katherine for that matter, because they did not want to go and get treatment in Adelaide or other capital cities. They have decided to stay in the Northern Territory and, often, have just taken as their lot that they are not going to survive cancer—just to be with their friends and family. Often with our Indigenous brothers and sisters that happens, as it does with our Greek and Chinese brothers and sisters, and older people from other ethnicities, too. They do not want to be away from family.

This facility now gives us the opportunity to treat people in the Northern Territory. Helen Smith told me the story of a young lady who was suffering from a lump in her breast and who decided that, rather than going interstate for treatment, she would go ahead and have a full mastectomy of that breast because she simply did not want to go interstate. So now a small area on a woman’s breast can be treated in a facility that is state of the art.

As I conclude, I do just want to mention briefly the contribution that the federal health minister has made to my electorate. While we debate health in this House—a debate, currently, about the hospitals and what the minister and Prime Minister are proposing—I want to quickly tell the House about what Minister Nicola Roxon has done for my electorate in the short time that she has been the health minister: $18.6 million for an accommodation complex of 50 units at the Royal Darwin Hospital; $27.8 million for a full medical program run by Flinders University out of Darwin, to train our own doctors; $4.3 million to the Royal Darwin Hospital to assist in reconfiguring the emergency department; $1.6 million for two new operating theatres; and $10 million for the construction of a superclinic in Palmerston, which is going quite well. There was also funding for a cancer breast care nurse at Royal Darwin Hospital. I just wanted to put on the public record my thanks to Minister Roxon for her efforts and her continued support of my electorate. (Time expired)