Sarah Courtney,Minister for Health
The Hodgman majority Liberal Government is in the final stages of delivering the state-of-the-art RHH redeveloped facility that will serve generations to come.
I welcome the Tasmanian Audit Office's (TAO) findings that the Royal Hobart Hospital Redevelopment, one of Tasmania's largest ever health infrastructure project "has, in all material aspects, been managed effectively."
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the project's Executive Steering Committee who effectively reset the project after the Taskforce and continued to provide strategic leadership and oversight across the five years of the Government project. The taskforce was put in place when we came to office, following the mismanagement of the project by the Labor-Green Government.
The RHH Redevelopment and the RHH are in a good position to move patient services safely and efficiently in coming months.
We have the right people for the job and the results confirm the approach necessary for large scale public infrastructure projects.
This is vastly different from the previous AG report* into the RHH Redevelopment in January 2014 which found:
- The Labor-Green Government had totally mismanaged one of the largest health infrastructure projects ever built;
- Work on the redeveloped hospital hadn't even started, despite the need for a new hospital identified in 2005;
- The project was dogged by impaired and "weak" governance; too many oversight bodies: delays ("substantial slippages occurred in finalising the design and appointing a managing contractor"); and project budget overruns.
It took an incoming Liberal Government to get the project back on track, while Labor failed to lay a single brick.
There will now be 44 additional, permanently funded and staffed beds from our 250 bed plan.
It is estimated that around 2,500 extra patients will be treated each year as a result of these bed openings.
*https://www.audit.tas.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/RHHR-Final-16Jan2014.pdf
