Thursday, 23 March 2023

 Daniel ANDREWS (Mulgrave – Premier) (14:04): I am delighted to rise to update the house on the government’s record investment in health services, particularly those that relate to catching up on different procedures and different parts of our health system that for the best of reasons and based on public health advice had to be interrupted and sometimes cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last week I was out in Werribee at the Werribee Mercy Hospital to thank personally staff and administrators there. They do a fantastic job right across their network of service provision, not just in the west but of course in the north as well. They are outstanding Victorians who work very hard. What we were celebrating and marking was one of the eight new fit-for-purpose rapid access hubs. This is all about concentration of effort. It is all about not having planned surgery or elective surgery competing with emergency surgery. It is all about making sure we have the size, the scale, the equipment and the workforce so we can have the throughput and the efficiencies, or to put it another way, people getting the surgery they need faster and closer to home. We are rolling this out not just at Werribee, where there is a focus on endoscopy procedures; there will be some 800 additional endoscopies performed at Werribee Mercy, and it will mean less people have to travel out of their community, the community they have helped to build, in order to get the care that they need. Beyond that there are of course other hubs that are to open at Broadmeadows and Sandringham Hospital and indeed five theatres in operation already at St Vincent’s on the park. In addition to that, the next iteration, the next step forward on this, will be University Hospital Geelong, the Heidelberg Repat and the Royal Women’s Hospital. This is all part of a $1.5 billion investment to make sure that we can catch up, recover and be stronger for this pandemic event – not a blitz, not a one-off, but going from 200,000 procedures to 240,000 procedures each and every year.