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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 497 ..

The ACT provided only 265 hospital treatments per $1 million of expenditure, compared to the national average of 331 treatments.

The minister talks about levels of expectation; so what is he doing? He is blaming people who are sick because they want a better service. Shame! The report continues:

The most notable component in the declining cost-effectiveness of the ACT system was a 51.1% increase in administration costs…

The minister has used all sorts of deflecting tactics, talking about machinery that was bought and saying that the government have spent money on this and done that. But the Leader of the Opposition and shadow minister for health has talked about administration costs. What is the minister doing to ensure that the administration costs are being brought down? He has not told us; he has not said anything about that. But he told us a lot about what he was buying. Obviously, with a 51.1 per cent increase in admin costs, something needs to be done. It does not take blind Freddy to see that, does it? Let us look at what the report says about comparability:

Criteria for measuring hospital results are highly uniform across jurisdictions—

So there is nothing out of the ordinary here; it is comparing apples with apples. It continues:

allowing the Reports to give quite comprehensive comparisons.

The Productivity Commission data is expressed in terms of unit costs per ‘cost-weighted separation’ (or “cws”). To explain these terms, a ‘separation’ is a completed treatment, while ‘cost-weighting’ allows diverse treatments to be compared. Hence, the number of cws achieved by a hospital and the cost of achieving them is directly comparable between all Australian public hospitals.

So there is nothing unusual or out of the ordinary here. It continues:

Cost-effectiveness of hospitals can be derived by reversing the costs/cws ratio to give (for example) the number of cost-weighted-separations per $million spent.

Under the item “National average” it states:

The national average cost of a public hospital inpatient service was 2,801 per cws in 2000-01. This national average rose to 3,017 in 2001-2—an increase of 7.7%.

Conversely, this means that $1 million of expenditure provided 357 hospital treatments in 2000-01, but only 331 treatments in 2001-2.

There are many, many figures here. Let us have a look further down the report at item 6, “ACT vs national cost components”:

Compared to the national results for 2001-02, the ACT recorded the following results:

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