Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Diagnostic imaging is a wonderful technology that medicine has these days and it is certainly expanding in all sorts of directions, making it much easier to diagnose problems with patients. Of course, as all things in the health system seem to do, the cost expands commensurate with the expansion of the technology.

There is a term, ‘positron emission tomography’, and there are perhaps only two people in this parliament tonight who know what that actually is—with apologies to the parliamentary secretary; perhaps there may be three. Of course, this is the technology for PET/CT scanners. It is just wonderful technology used by the medical profession to look at potential cancers in the body. Its main attribute is that it is so sensitive that with one scan it can pick up information that other technologies might take several scans to do. It helps patients because a diagnosis can be made much more quickly—and if you are a potential cancer patient, you need to know what is happening as quickly as possible.

There are not many of these machines around Australia. In the great state of Queensland, the sunshine state, there is no PET scanner north of Brisbane. Australia’s largest tropical city, the capital of Northern Australia, Townsville, has no PET scanner. Patients who are serviced by the Townsville Hospital and by the Mater Private Hospital have to fly to Brisbane if PET scanning is ordered by their doctor. Currently there are 500 patients a year going through the trauma of having to fly to Brisbane to have a PET scan—and it is increasing. The carers will often fly with the patients or they may have to be put up in Brisbane, and the cost just grows. I looked at this problem and said, ‘What can we do?’ That is why I am particularly pleased to be supporting this bill, the Health Insurance Amendment (Diagnostic Imaging Accreditation) Bill 2009, tonight.

I spoke to an imaging provider, who happens to be accredited, and that provider is keen to establish a PET scanner. They already have on their staff a doctor trained in nuclear medicine, so it was a no-brainer to see what we could do. I spoke to Queensland X-Ray and they agreed that they would fund half the capital cost of a PET scanner in North Queensland. It meant a great deal to the Commonwealth of Australia because it was a firm offer to have a publicly funded, bulk-billed PET scanner in North Queensland with $2 million put towards the cost of that machine.

In September we got a letter back from the Minister for Health and Ageing and, unfortunately, while she understood the need for North Queensland, she said that the government had announced $560 million in funding to build a network of up to 10 best practice regional cancer centres associated with accommodation centres. That is us in Townsville, but the problem is that it has to go through a tender process, which takes forever. The problem is that we do not have a resolution of that yet and it is now February. It seems to go on and on. Sometimes I have a bit of suspicion that bureaucrats delay these things to save money. Well, hello; there are patients out there—there are people in need. We cannot have the whole of Northern Australia without one of these wonderful machines. In the Townsville Bulletin in September, the editor was straightforward about it. He wrote:

Put bluntly, North Queenslanders are dying because we don’t have this piece of sophisticated medical equipment. Once again, geography is discriminating against the people of the North.

That is not fair. We are not second-class citizens in the north of Australia. We contribute so much to GDP with what we have in the north, and it is unfair that our communities do not have the same facilities as communities further south have. I sometimes wonder whether the line that was drawn in World War II called the Brisbane Line actually still exists, with the discrimination we see.

The PET scanner is a nuclear medicine facility that can determine the presence, progress and severity of cancers, neurological conditions and cardiovascular disease. PET images reveal the chemistry of organs and other tissue, such as tumours. There is certainly growing evidence of the usefulness and cost-effectiveness of PET scans for the treatment of cancer sufferers.

When the health minister responded to my letter she indicated a number of conditions to establishing a PET scanner in North Queensland. She said the views of the Queensland government would need to be established in order for funding to be considered. That is code for: the Townsville Hospital and their staff would have to be prepared to use a PET scanner in a private consultancy. I am very happy to say that the management of the Townsville Hospital are entirely, 100 per cent, supportive of this project. Their doctors and other staff know the benefit of securing a PET scanner in North Queensland and they are not going to have a turf war, as so often happens between public and private hospitals. They are pleased just to get a PET scanner. If it is not in their hospital they do not care; they are worried about the patients. What a wonderful approach. I thank the good people at the Townsville Hospital for adopting a common-sense view. Of course, Queensland X-Ray will take the public patients and do what a public hospital would do for them, so there is no disadvantage at all in having a PET scanner located in a private consultant’s rooms.

There has to be, according to the health minister, access to a secured and reliable source of radiopharmaceuticals. That is already the case. In Northern Australia we have those radiopharmaceuticals available. A further condition was the facility’s ability to meet the requirements outlined in the current PET determination 2008, and it does already. The facility would only be eligible for general PET items on the Medicare Benefits Schedule, and the consultant agrees with that as well. That really clears the way, and we have written back to the health minister guaranteeing that that is the situation. As we go from problem to problem in the Townsville Hospital—longer waiting lists, workforce issues, no beds—this is one bright star where we can provide a service if only the health minister will turn on the green light. I appeal to the health minister to think of us in Northern Australia and provide this much-needed machine.

On a related issue—and you, Mr Deputy Speaker Washer, will understand this better than most—specialists who consult in the private system and the public system continually say to me, ‘We’re twice as efficient in the private system,’ meaning that if there is a procedure happening you can do two in the private system in the same time as you can do one in the public system. And, by the way, I think the staff are happier in the private system as well. Why is that so? These kinds of workforce issues have to be looked at. You have to ask why in the private system there are three people in an operating theatre and in the public system there are 14. Why would that be? It is extraordinarily inefficient.

If a patient in the private system comes into the operating theatre and one piece of paperwork is not quite right—there might be something not filled in, a number missing or something—everybody in the operating theatre in the private system gets it fixed there and then. They jump on the telephone from the theatre, get the information that is needed, fill in the form and away they go. But what happens in the public system? If something, even the smallest detail, is missing, the staff down tools and send the patient back to the ward, and the operation gets cancelled and then rescheduled.

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