Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the most traumatic things that can happen to a family from a regional or country area is to have a sudden illness or injury inflicted on their family. Quite often this involves a very quick trip to a city to a large hospital for treatment. One of the problems when these people get to the city area is that they are in a completely unfamiliar area in unfamiliar surroundings and they are at a loss to know where to go to find the services that they need.

One of these people is a constituent of mine, a young lady by the name of Kelly Foran. Kelly Foran has had a series of health issues, not only for herself but also for members of her family—multiple issues that would lay most people low and probably suffering from self-pity. Kelly Foran has built on her own experiences and is working very hard to help others in the position that she found herself in.

She has actually formed an organisation called Friendly Faces Helping Hands. This is a multifaceted thing—from a website which has been designed to printed information that is placed in doctors surgeries and with a phone backup service. Friendly Faces Helping Hands lists commonsense services that people may need to find—for instance, where you can find cheap parking near large metropolitan hospitals, where you can find affordable accommodation, where the social workers are located in the hospital, where you can buy nappies after hours and how you can get there by public transport; a whole range of things that if you find yourself on a very quick trip to an unfamiliar area you just do not know.

Kelly has been running this pretty well on her own with some donations from family, friends and community members. She has grown this to a situation now where she has information on the larger hospitals in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. She has helped countless people with what she is doing. Kelly does this from the little community of Maules Creek, which is out from Narrabri in north-west New South Wales.

Last week I raised with the health minister what Kelly has been doing. There are government websites to help people who are in this position but they mainly deal with government services. There is nothing comparable to what Friendly Faces Helping Hand does and the broader, more practical, commonsense approach that it takes. So on Kelly's behalf I made a request to the health minister for some financial assistance so that Kelly can grow Friendly Faces Helping Hands into a more sustainable-type unit and so she does not have to eat into her own personal savings in order for this service to continue and be expanded, I believe, to a nation-wide website that can help people all across Australia. I am hopeful that the health minister will look upon this favourably. She certainly gave me a great hearing when I spoke to her last week. As I know from personal experience, to have to travel to a larger city hospital, quite often under rushed circumstances, can be very difficult. (Time expired)