MS DE CHASTEL: Thank you. Good luck with it all. Thank you. DR KING: Thank you. Now, the next organisation is Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association. Thank you, Ms Verhoeven. MS VERHOEVEN: you, and Dr Thurecht. DR KING: Again, if you could formally just state your name and organisation for the transcript. MS VERHOEVEN: Sure. I’m Alison Verhoeven, Chief Executive of the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association. DR THURECHT: My name is Dr Linc Thurecht, from the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association. DR KING: And are there opening remarks that you would like to make? MS VERHOEVEN: Yes, thank you. DR KING: you. MS VERHOEVEN: So the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association is a national peak body for public hospitals and not for profit hospitals and other healthcare providers including the primary care sector. So primary health networks, community health services, some aged care providers, and also a range of academic and clinical individual members as well. Our submission has focused largely on the health component of your report, so - and I’ll talk a little bit to that this morning. We acknowledged in a number of submissions that we’ve made to you that the healthcare sector is very complex, as you understand, with a mix of public and private service providers, public and private funding, and increasingly consumer costs associated with that. So that is part of the context in which we are speaking today. We want to highlight right from the outset, too, our concerns around the information asymmetry between consumers and healthcare providers, not only in terms of the clinical attributes related to their care, but also in terms of cost. So we think that places a significant emphasis on the principal agent relationship between the and the care provider. The complexity
the states been negotiated. Your work should feed into that, so we are not talking about waiting to solve a problem, we are talking about making the process one, and not being separate. MR INNIS: Okay, so it is connecting into the process was really your advice to us? MS HAYHURST: Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly, yes. MR INNIS: Yes, thank you. DR KING: Coordinating in amongst policy advisors. MS HAYHURST: Coordinating, yes. DR KING: Goodness. But that means we have to take account of our own recommendations. Oh, gosh. Thank you very much for your participation today. Thank you very much. MS HAYHURST: Thank you. MS WINZAR: Thank you. DR KING: And we will for lunch now. Look, if we can come back in about an hour. Say 1.40, let’s aim to restart then. Thank you. ADJOURNED AT 12.35 PM RESUMED AT 1.37 PM DR KING: Let me recommence the hearings after lunch. This was mentioned earlier, but for those of you who were not in the room, at the conclusion of today’s scheduled participants, I will ask if anyone else would like to briefly appear at this hearing. Please speak with our one of our team if you would like to do that. Just a reminder before we start again, the microphones are just for the transcript not for sound amplification, so we need to keep our voices up. This as much reminding Sean and myself as someone else. Finally, I like to welcome the representatives from St Vincent de Paul Society National Council. If you wouldn’t mind just stating names and restating the organisation just for the transcript.