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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 10 Hansard (24 November) . . Page.. 2783 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Health and Community Care. Together, the number of patients on elective surgery waiting lists and the waiting times provide a useful tool to monitor timeliness and access to elective care. The emphasis, therefore, should be on waiting times, as assessed in terms of the patient's clinical need.

Mr Berry: You have not mentioned beds.

MR MOORE: Mr Speaker, let me refer, in response, to the expenditure of the critical and urgent treatment, or CUT, funding money. This Government has taken the following steps: Eight hundred and ten cost-weighted separations over and above Calvary Public Hospital's base have been purchased specifically to address overdue patients, particularly those waiting for elective surgery procedures in the orthopaedics specialty. That accounts for $1.5m from the CUT funding. This is in addition, of course, to $1.7m allocated from the additional throughput pool for elective surgery, mainly in orthopaedics, incorporated in Calvary's base contract. Also, an offer of $3m - $1.3m additional throughput and $1.7m CUT funding - has been made to the Canberra Hospital for the purchase of additional elective surgery throughput in 1998-99, specifically to target long waiting lists. At this stage, that offer has not been taken up.

A contract with Lidia Perin Memorial Hospital has been successfully executed, which will ensure the provision of elective plastic surgery to 158 public patients from the Canberra Hospital who are already overdue for surgery. I must say that that contract is at competitive prices, about $170,000. The department has also written to other ACT private hospitals to determine whether they would be in a position to undertake elective surgery in those specialties where there are long waiting lists. We have also started setting up a waiting times management system, which is aimed at better managing waiting times for elective surgery. As part of this system, we are intending to trial a number of selected procedures so that we can more effectively take care of existing backlogs and provide treatment to patients within an agreed timeframe of six months.

Mr Speaker, I began by saying that I believe that Mr Stanhope's suggestion that a third of the elective surgery in each of the categories is overdue is incorrect. Mr Stanhope, I will check that and make sure that I am accurate in that statement, and I will give you the very specifics on it.

MR STANHOPE: Mr Speaker, I have a supplementary question. Noting that the VMO dispute ended almost five months ago, noting the initiatives which the Minister has just announced and noting that the waiting lists have shown very little downward movement, I ask: Can the Minister tell us how long he thinks it will be before we see some genuine improvement in waiting lists and waiting times?

MR MOORE: I have to say that I do not think there are any magic solutions to waiting lists. That is one of the reasons why I welcomed the examination by the Health and Community Care Committee, so that they can assess what we are doing and the plans we have to improve waiting times. I think it is amply illustrated by the fact that we are prepared to use $1.7m from the critical and urgent treatment money for the Canberra Hospital and the Canberra Hospital has difficulty working out how they are going to deal with that in terms of their theatres, bed numbers and so on. Remember that it is one-off funding and it is difficult to set up a system to employ people and then, effectively,

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