Page 2912 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 12 October 2022
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Let me run through a few of the key statistics from this budget that paint a damning picture of our health system. Budget statements C reveals the number of patients forced to wait longer than clinically recommended for elective surgery. The target was 430 days. However, it turns out that we ended up at 1,364 days, which is longer than clinically recommended. This is almost 320 per cent over the minister’s budget. Only 52 per cent, barely half of all patients, were seen in four hours or less in our emergency department, which is five per cent worse than last year.
The wait times have declined despite the minister’s promise to increase this number to 70 per cent by October last year. The number of avoidable re-admissions to the hospital were more than double what the minister targeted. We could talk about staff absences due to occupational violence. This has also blown out, which is concerning when we learn that Canberra Health Services and ACT Health are forecasting a decrease of 124 FTE staff. Canberra’s health system is on its knees.
During 2021-22 a total of 1,065 health staff reported mental stress to Canberra Health Services. This mental stress category had the biggest number of incidents in the RiskMan system. Mental stress comprised almost 40 per cent of all reported incidents. This means that every month approximately 90 of our hardworking, much-valued health workers are reporting that their work has caused them mental stress. That is a lot, 90.
This is no surprise when we read media reports of nurses and midwives protesting outside the Assembly asking and pleading for this government to take their concerns seriously; exhausted nurses wearing incontinence pads because they do not get toilet breaks; staff walking past patients in the corridors afraid of what they are going to see; and midwives fearing a catastrophic incident is imminent.
The results of the November 2020-21 culture survey reflected the dire state of our health system and how our health workers are suffering. More than in one in eight staff revealed that they want to leave in the next two years; two out of three staff have confessed that they do not trust management; and almost two-thirds of staff did not believe the organisation had made any significant improvements in the past 12 months.
The budget reveals that there are at least 18 projects that have been delayed by CHS and ACT Health. Furthermore, the government has failed to spend one-third of its capital works budget for health infrastructure over the past five years. This adds up to $250 million that was not spent on health infrastructure. One significant example is, of course, the Canberra Hospital. This was promised for 2020, and now we know that it will be—or we hope—that it will be completed by 2024.
Former Labor Chief Minister Jon Stanhope and former Treasury official Khalid Ahmed have referred to a 150-bed shortfall compared to the 2011 capital asset plan. The supply of hospital beds has been significantly less than what was initially promised, despite Canberra’s rapidly ageing population and the growing demands on our health system.
In recent estimates hearings we learned that the government has again failed to meet its own elective surgery waiting targets. During the 2021-22 financial year, the
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