Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Under the state Liberal government in Tasmania, Tasmania's health system has lurched from crisis to crisis. Our two main hospitals, Royal Hobart Hospital and Launceston General Hospital, are particularly affected—ambulances parked so far up the ramps that patients have to be discharged on the street and wheeled into emergency from the street; and emergency wards so full that patients are being forced to sleep in corridors and staff are contemplating turning storerooms into ward rooms. Kids and teenagers with mental illness have nowhere to go. Women cannot access publicly funded terminations in the state. There are long waiting lists for surgery. People are unable to access services in the regions that I represent. And now, in today's Mercury newspaper, we read that nurses are finally at breaking point. Theatre nurses are working five and six hours of overtime every single day, and there's been at least one nurse who's worked a 24-hour shift. Can anyone here imagine working 24 hours in a theatre in surgery?

Dr Gillespie interjecting—

The member for Lyne is saying he can. Maybe he can offer a contribution about what it's like, and whether it's good practice for the health system to do that. It's absolutely unacceptable. The Liberals are failing health in Tasmania and they're underspending by $100 million— (Time expired)