Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to raise with the minister the announcement in the appropriations for health that three new MRI licences are to be allocated. I do not know whether the minister at the table is aware of this, but I know that Minister Abbott is aware that we have been lobbying for five years to get an MRI licence allocation at Wollongong Hospital. I am obviously very keen to know whether the three new licences are already identified to go to particular places. If not, if there is going to be a process by which a new round of allocations will occur, will it go on existing lists and requests or will a new round of requests and indications of interest be required? I would like the minister to jump up and assure me that Wollongong will get one, but I suspect that that is probably a bit of a premature expectation. At least if we knew what the process will be and what the intentions are for those three licences that would be useful to my community. It would be especially useful for the specialist base in Wollongong, because it is a major referral hospital and people from there constantly ring me to find out when they can get a licence for the hospital base machine for their patients. It is not so much your standard MRI for people who have sporting injuries and so forth. It is the major oncology and radiology referral hospital, so those specialists practising in that town centre really want to be able to send their patients to the Wollongong facility for an MRI scan, rather than, as some of them are doing, admitting them overnight to hospital in order to get a bulk-billed scan done as an in-patient. We are particularly keen to know what is happening with those three announced licences.

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