“Surely, it is time for proper examination by an independent body of what can be done to fix the Canberra public hospital system. Leaving it to Rachel Stephen-Smith has not worked,” writes political columnist MICHAEL MOORE. 

Three months after the October 2020 election plans were being made to fix the struggling Canberra public hospital system.

Announcements were made by Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith, about how waiting times in the Emergency Departments, for example, would be brought to Australian standards within nine months.

It was a well-rehearsed response. Groundhog Day. Three months after the 2024 election the same minister has announced a new fix – an injection of $227.3million into the system “to meet demand”. 

Such an injection is certainly welcome and will, hopefully make a significant difference. Or will it be another Groundhog Day?

Despite the spin, the Canberra Hospital system languishes amongst the lowest on national performance targets. Will it be the same story in nine months? 

Surely, it is time for proper examination by an independent body of what can be done to fix the Canberra public hospital system. Leaving it to Rachel Stephen-Smith has not worked. 

In response to a question in the ACT Legislative Assembly in 2021, the minister stated: “I have been having a lot of conversations with Canberra Health Services, as I have talked about in this place many times over the last 18 months”. 

Her attempts to lift the standard of the hospital system to be at least on a par with hospitals across Australia proved futile.

Excuse after excuse and reassurance after reassurance – but the issues remain.

The excuse this time is that the system was taken by surprise with an 85,000 increase in patient visits in the latter half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023. Spin! 

The vast bulk of the increase is 67,000 additional attendances at the four Walk-in-Centres. These were designed to reduce pressure on hospitals. 

However, there were 6000 more emergency department visits and 6000 more overnight stays.

The excuse was that “we didn’t know whether that (patient visits) was going to plateau or whether that growth was going to continue to increase. And, in fact… we have seen that growth continue”. For some reason it was “not what we were projecting was going to happen, but it also isn’t out of the ballpark of what other jurisdictions have.” Spin!

The current announcement is in marked contrast to the one in early December last year when the minister was celebrating big improvements in Emergency Departments based on AIHW figures for 2023-24. Perhaps those poor projections entwined with Labor’s election spin? 

There is a double-bladed sword. Savings are going to have to be made in health. An injection on one hand and a reduction starting with $27 million. Orwellian “Newspeak”! The argument, inter alia, is that savings will be made by cutting expensive “agency staff” and employing new graduates and recruiting nationally and internationally.

Stephen-Smith argues increased capacity and recruitment will mean these savings measures would not impact services. This is not the first time for this sort of spin. Just one  example includes bringing Calvary Public Hospital into the hands of Canberra Health Services.

In 2021 the minister argued that the problems were being addressed. 

“We have taken a very whole-of-hospital and whole-of-system approach to this,” she said.

“We have focused, within the rest of the hospital, outside the emergency department, on ensuring that people can be discharged in a timely way”. 

She told the Assembly the solution was “the red-to-green strategy (that) identifies barriers to discharge and gets patients discharged from the hospital in a timely way, to free up those beds in the rest of the hospital for the emergency department, to address what is commonly known as bed block”.

This followed the comment by Jon Stanhope as far back as January 2020 when he and Khalid Ahmed asserted in CityNews: “There is simply no evidence, that we could find, to support the minister’s assertions that the poor performance of our public hospitals is related to complexity or an unexpected and unplanned for surge in demand”.

But the same explanation is out there this month. Groundhog Day!

The federal government has provided some good news in health investment for the coming financial year. On top of the ACT’s $227.3million for this year, there will be a $50million injection into our public hospitals for 2025-26. 

Rather than waiting for another Groundhog Day announcement – the minister should seek some help and maybe announce a Royal Commission to examine what has been going wrong and what should be done about it.

Michael Moore is a former member of the ACT Legislative Assembly and an independent minister for health. He has been a political columnist with “CityNews” since 2006.