Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Why are ambulances being forced to wait with COVID patients for hours on end, parked outside Sydney hospitals, because these hospitals are being overwhelmed? What responsibility does the Prime Minister take for leaving our hospital system unprepared 18 months into this pandemic?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I respectfully note to the member that there are challenges around the world. As we know, there have been over 700,000 cases in the last 24 hours and 14½ thousand lives lost. The global pandemic was something that, as the Prime Minister noted, we acted on early. We began to prepare our hospitals for it at the earliest time. In particular, not only did we declare this to be a disease of pandemic potential on 21 January 2020; we began the work to prepare both our public and our private hospital systems from the outset. That included the acquisition of ventilators. That included the acquisition of masks, gloves and gowns. We've already acquired 500 million masks, and we've made 94 million of those available through the National Medical Stockpile. In terms of ventilators, there is 7½ thousand capacity around the country; New South Wales is over 2,000 capacity for ventilators.

In particular, though, the thing which we thought was fundamentally important was to create a national partnership to support our hospitals. That national partnership was, I believe, almost unique in Australian history; I'm not aware of anything quite as comparable around the world, although there have been some very good partnerships with regard to public and private hospitals. The private hospitals viability guarantee is designed to create a partnership where over 57,000 nurses and over 100,000 staff are available in times of surge. That has now been invoked in New South Wales. That was created to assist in precisely this moment—planned, prepared and now enacted. As the Prime Minister said, the first 19 hospitals from the private sector have already been included within it. It was enacted at earlier times last year. It has been reinvoked now. Those 19 hospitals have so far been tasked by NSW Health to provide 300 nurses. Beds, ventilators and staff are all available under that guarantee. Additional hospitals are also available.

So it was foreseen; the plans and preparations were put in place. It was used during the course of last year. It provides a surge capacity for any aged-care residents which also need additional support outside of an acute care setting, and then, ultimately, it provides nurses, staff, beds and ventilators to assist any public health system anywhere in Australia at any moment where they may have a crisis because of COVID.