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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 489 ..

Labor is focused on quality—quality outcomes for the people of Canberra.

The Press Ganey satisfaction survey states that the people of Canberra do not think they are getting the quality about which the Minister speaks. The press release then states:

While efficiency is a priority, it is not at the cost of health outcomes...Our health system should be judged by outcomes, not just how much it costs.

Let us look at the outcomes and at Labor’s average from October 2001 until now. Mr Corbell seems to be under the impression that there is more throughput than is reflected on those lists and that the numbers on the lists are increasing as more people are joining them. Again, that is not true. From October 2001 until now, under Labor, 642 patients per month had access to surgery. If Labor is running the health system better and if it is getting more quality as a result of having put more money into the system, we would expect the waiting list figure to be much better than it was under the Liberals.

From January 2000 until September 2001 under the previous Liberal government 701 patients per month had access to surgery—almost 60 more than there are now under the better-managed health system which has had an additional $6 million injected into it. This minister is not giving the health system the attention that it deserves. What did Mr Corbell do in his first year in office? It is not the minister’s fault that he was health minister for only a year and a bit, but let us look at the figures for the first 12 months that Mr Corbell was health minister. I remind members about what Mr Corbell said on 23 March 2003:

I am concerned about waiting times for less urgent elective surgery—category two and three.

Mr Corbell expressed concern about the waiting lists—something about which you, Mr Speaker, would be aware. In December 2002, when Mr Corbell first became Minister for Health, the waiting list was 3,854—a legacy from Mr Stanhope. Twelve months later—happy anniversary and well done, Mr Corbell—an amazing 4,264 people are on the waiting lists. So the number of people on those waiting lists has increased. The number one priority of the minister was to address the waiting list and less urgent elective surgery problems.

In that time the number of patients who were overdue for surgery grew by 8 per cent. The number of people on the waiting lists increased by 10 per cent and the number of people overdue for surgery increased by 8 per cent under a minister who said he was committed to resolving the waiting list problem. When we recently received the waiting list figures for January 2004 we found that we had reached a four-year high. The number of people on the waiting list breaks the 4,500 mark—at 4,509. The number of patients who are overdue for surgery is going through the roof. We have received reports from several surgeons in orthopaedics that their quota of hip and knee replacements has already been done—and this at a time when more costly surgery is not being done and less costly surgery is being done.

Surgery is all-important to anyone who is waiting for it. At Calvary, 58 per cent of category 2 patients were overdue for surgery at the end of January. Sixty-four per cent of those patients required orthopaedic surgery and all operations involved plastic surgery.

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