Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about the Flinders Medical Centre and its proposal for a centre for innovation in cancer. The Flinders Medical Centre is an important institution in Adelaide’s southern suburbs. It is a 500-bed teaching hospital, which has 3,500 staff and also 500 volunteers, making this the largest volunteer group of any hospital in Adelaide. It has expertise in a range of cancers and is world renowned for its work in leukaemia, bowel cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, cervical cancer and oesophageal cancer.

The Flinders Medical Centre proposes to establish a centre for innovation in cancer care. This would be a centre which groups together clinicians and researchers and which would focus on being a centre of excellence in the prevention of cancer through approaches such as population screening, in which it has particular expertise. Australia does not have a cancer centre of this sort, although there are some cancer centres in the United States which adopt this approach. This would be a great facility for residents of the southern suburbs. As a public hospital doctor, a former surgical registrar, I know that when a hospital has a good research function and the clinicians are involved in research you do see excellence in care. This would be a good thing for my constituents.

This proposal for a centre is expected to cost over $20 million. It is a very important priority for my constituents, and I will be working to see that the federal government makes a contribution to the Flinders cancer centre so that we can have this fantastic facility for the southern suburbs. In my electorate of Boothby we have a very high proportion of people over 65. It is an elderly population and, as a consequence, there is a prevalence of cancer. This would be a tremendous facility to add to what is already an outstanding public hospital.

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