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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 9 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 3314 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

From March 2003 the patient information bulletins produced by each hospital ceased to include tables reporting on surgical waiting lists. The surgical waiting list reports previously included patient numbers waiting at the start of the month; patients added to the list by being reclassified, or added for the first time; patients removed from the list because of admission, or for other reasons; and patients waiting at the end of the month.

There are also figures on the extent to which the throughput meets the target, the number of patients overdue for surgery and the percentage overdue. All of these statistics are broken down by surgery speciality and by urgency category. Then there are statistics on the average length of wait by urgency category and by surgery speciality and the average waiting time of overdue patients.

With the government's amendments we are being asked to support that the Assembly notes that the previous Liberal government did not publish hospital waiting list information on a set date. This responds to Mr Smyth's motion's call for the figures to be published both in the Assembly and on the web by the 21st of each month.

I cannot support this part of the government amendment; it would be misleading. The previous government did not have a set date, but there was no set requirement for the stats to be published. Nonetheless, the health minister did table the monthly information bulletins regularly. In 1999, for example, the index to papers presented shows that the bulletins were tabled for every month but August and at frequent intervals.

I do not know what practical limitations there are on the 21st of the month timeline set by Mr Smyth's motion, but I understand by Mr Corbell's amendment that there may be some difficulties. My amendment means that, rather than calling for the information to be circulated on a particular date, we are calling for it to be provided as soon as practicable. Of course, that is within a month because it requires monthly reporting.

My amendment also adds to the information we are asking to be tabled. The previous government tabled the entire information bulletin patient activity report, of which the waiting list data were a part. The bulletin as a whole includes data on admission by month, occupied bed days by month, hospital acute in-patients average length of stay and non in-patient occasions of service. The argument for having the waiting list numbers tables holds also for this broader package of information. Waiting lists do, of course, lend themselves to headlines, but the other information informs our picture of what is happening with the hospitals.

Mr Corbell contends in his amendment that the monthly provision of information by speciality could lead to the identification of specific patients. However, in one of the government's own reports on waiting lists for June 2003 there is an explanation of the situations for four particular patients. While their names do not appear, this description of the circumstances is much more personal than the statistics, even when the statistics are small. Under the heading "Long waits by category", it reads:

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