Mr HENDERSON - 2001-06-07
I remind the minister that the mission statement of his department is ‘to improve the health and well being of all people in the Northern Territory’.
Nick and Di Coe have a 10 year old son, Teal, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. At least 10 other Territorians suffer with CF. There is no specialist cystic fibrosis clinic in the Northern Territory which means sufferers have to travel to Adelaide for specialist treatment. Paediatricians have confirmed Teal needs this specialist treatment three times a year yet the Coes’ request for funding under the Patient Assisted Travel Scheme have been denied and he needs this funding to access essential treatment.
Will you approve access to PATS funding for the Coes? If not, can you explain how Teal’s health and well being will be improved by your refusal to do so?
ANSWER
Mr Speaker, we are getting a little glimpse here of how these people would run government. First, we have to describe what the Patient Assisted Travel Scheme is, and I talked about it a little bit the other day. The Patient Assisted Travel Scheme supports the travel of some 16 000 Territorians every year. They are people travelling into hospital here in the Territory, they are people travelling in from bush, they are people going south for treatment because we do not have specialties here of the type that has just been described.
If the member is saying that the decisions for who should travel should be a political one ...
Mr Henderson: No, a medical one.
Mr DUNHAM: ... I would say - that is the nub of the question - I would say that this is very dangerous ground he is on. Because the people who make the decision are doctors and they make the decision on the basis of medical judgement. Now, he is asking me to make a decision on the basis of political judgement. This is the very same mob who are asking us do we understand separation of powers and all that stuff. Do we know where the community benefit grants are going? They are asking me now to intrude on the decision made by doctors about who should travel, where they should travel, and when they should travel.
I will say to the parliament that the issues relating to PATS frequently come to my office. Certainly on my colleague’s side here. They are very aggressive, I suppose is the word I could use, in knocking on my door and bringing to my attention issues relating to the patient assisted travel scheme. It is a very emotional area because often the people who are travelling are travelling on a very urgent basis for a procedure that will affect their lives and which sometimes only days before they did not know they had a particular condition. So it is a highly emotional area.
How we organise it is we try in the first place to make sure that we can treat the person here. So the first medical judgment we make is whether our Royal Darwin Hospital is capable of doing that treatment, and for the smaller hospitals like Tennant Creek often we fly them to Alice or to Darwin. Having made that judgment, we treat them here and that is why we are trying to improve our specialties. It is recognised, and I recognised it in the House the other day, that it will be along time before we have all specialties available here in the Northern Territory and that is why some 16 000 people are flown around the place.
The decision as to who flies is based on two counts. The first is: can we make this provision of this assistance available through a visiting specialist - and that obviously is based on the judgment as to whether the particular client can wait. These are medical calls as to whether someone can wait for a visiting specialist or do they have to be urgently flown south.
The other judgment we make, and we are getting a little bit better with electronic wizardry, is if somebody has a particular procedure done in another place, we are trying to make sure that some of the follow-up procedures that are probably not as complex, whether they can be done here through tele-medicine or done through having a relationship with a particular specialist here with an interstate colleague.
The first thing we are trying to do is to try to keep people here. The inevitability of people travelling will be with us for some time, but I can say to the honourable member for Wanguri that if patients have difficulty with the decision made by PATS - and there are many of them who do - there is the capability to have an independent further review of that decision. That independent further review is also done by doctors and if the Territory was ever in the unfortunate position where that man was sitting in the health minister’s chair, we would have a decision made by a politician about who should travel and who should not. In my particular case, it is my preference that I would leave that with people who are trained in these judgements and those people trained in these judgements are called doctors.
Nick and Di Coe have a 10 year old son, Teal, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. At least 10 other Territorians suffer with CF. There is no specialist cystic fibrosis clinic in the Northern Territory which means sufferers have to travel to Adelaide for specialist treatment. Paediatricians have confirmed Teal needs this specialist treatment three times a year yet the Coes’ request for funding under the Patient Assisted Travel Scheme have been denied and he needs this funding to access essential treatment.
Will you approve access to PATS funding for the Coes? If not, can you explain how Teal’s health and well being will be improved by your refusal to do so?
ANSWER
Mr Speaker, we are getting a little glimpse here of how these people would run government. First, we have to describe what the Patient Assisted Travel Scheme is, and I talked about it a little bit the other day. The Patient Assisted Travel Scheme supports the travel of some 16 000 Territorians every year. They are people travelling into hospital here in the Territory, they are people travelling in from bush, they are people going south for treatment because we do not have specialties here of the type that has just been described.
If the member is saying that the decisions for who should travel should be a political one ...
Mr Henderson: No, a medical one.
Mr DUNHAM: ... I would say - that is the nub of the question - I would say that this is very dangerous ground he is on. Because the people who make the decision are doctors and they make the decision on the basis of medical judgement. Now, he is asking me to make a decision on the basis of political judgement. This is the very same mob who are asking us do we understand separation of powers and all that stuff. Do we know where the community benefit grants are going? They are asking me now to intrude on the decision made by doctors about who should travel, where they should travel, and when they should travel.
I will say to the parliament that the issues relating to PATS frequently come to my office. Certainly on my colleague’s side here. They are very aggressive, I suppose is the word I could use, in knocking on my door and bringing to my attention issues relating to the patient assisted travel scheme. It is a very emotional area because often the people who are travelling are travelling on a very urgent basis for a procedure that will affect their lives and which sometimes only days before they did not know they had a particular condition. So it is a highly emotional area.
How we organise it is we try in the first place to make sure that we can treat the person here. So the first medical judgment we make is whether our Royal Darwin Hospital is capable of doing that treatment, and for the smaller hospitals like Tennant Creek often we fly them to Alice or to Darwin. Having made that judgment, we treat them here and that is why we are trying to improve our specialties. It is recognised, and I recognised it in the House the other day, that it will be along time before we have all specialties available here in the Northern Territory and that is why some 16 000 people are flown around the place.
The decision as to who flies is based on two counts. The first is: can we make this provision of this assistance available through a visiting specialist - and that obviously is based on the judgment as to whether the particular client can wait. These are medical calls as to whether someone can wait for a visiting specialist or do they have to be urgently flown south.
The other judgment we make, and we are getting a little bit better with electronic wizardry, is if somebody has a particular procedure done in another place, we are trying to make sure that some of the follow-up procedures that are probably not as complex, whether they can be done here through tele-medicine or done through having a relationship with a particular specialist here with an interstate colleague.
The first thing we are trying to do is to try to keep people here. The inevitability of people travelling will be with us for some time, but I can say to the honourable member for Wanguri that if patients have difficulty with the decision made by PATS - and there are many of them who do - there is the capability to have an independent further review of that decision. That independent further review is also done by doctors and if the Territory was ever in the unfortunate position where that man was sitting in the health minister’s chair, we would have a decision made by a politician about who should travel and who should not. In my particular case, it is my preference that I would leave that with people who are trained in these judgements and those people trained in these judgements are called doctors.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016