Emma Husar (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take this opportunity to read onto the record some of the stories I have been told regarding Nepean Hospital. My community's hospital has the longest emergency department waiting times in the state and the longest elective surgery waiting times, and both are getting worse. Too often I think these facts and figures are lost on policy and decision makers. The reality is that every failure of the health system has real and lasting effects on real people. These taxpayers deserve a properly funded health system but instead, in the case of the Western Sydney community that I represent, they are provided with a hospital that has too few beds, too few doctors and too few nurses to serve the 350,000-plus people that it is there to serve. That growing population is being left behind. It is not acceptable, and I call on the Prime Minister to reverse the cuts to health and hospitals and commit to the Nepean upgrade without delay.

I was recently told about a young woman who had the wherewithal to take herself to the emergency department during a mental health episode. She waited 18 hours in the emergency department, without food, before she saw a doctor. She remained in hospital for a considerable period of time afterwards, such was the severity of her mental health condition. There is a lady in her 70s who is forced to travel to Randwick or Royal North Shore Hospital every month for her disabled husband to take tests on his spine. If there was a bed available in Nepean, he could attend there. They are still doing the two-hour trip every day from Nepean to the North Shore. This is frustrating and I call on the government to change it immediately. (Time expired)