Page 392 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 7 March 2006
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by those who run and use the health system. Like the minister, I, too, am looking forward to the further improvements to health care that this program will provide.
It is a shame that those opposite cannot acknowledge the valuable work being undertaken by people throughout our health system to improve access and care. Despite the ingenuous claims by those opposite, the people of the ACT can be confident that they will continue to receive high quality health care from our hospitals and health services.
No category 1 patients have to wait in our emergency departments for care. The ACT is among the best in the nation in making sure that all category 1 elective surgery patients get the surgery they need on time. Our hospitals are managing an increase in demand for inpatient services of about 10 per cent. Emergency department demand has increased by nine per cent this year compared to last. Outpatient demand continues to increase at double-digit percentages each year, and we are managing this demand. This is not a system in crisis. Our hospitals continue to perform at, or better than, benchmarks for patient safety and quality.
To further improve the quality of our care the government has consolidated patient safety services across the portfolio under a single banner. The government has also increased funding for patient safety initiatives by adding $0.5 million this year rising to $0.9 million per year from 2006 to 2007. This initiative will further improve the monitoring of patient safety in our services and provide the strategic direction needed to ensure a continued focus on improving the quality of our services.
We are also better at telling the community about how their health services are performing. Never before have the community had access to such clear, concise and comprehensive information about their health services in a single place. The new health services performance report is published quarterly on the ACT Health website. Under the leadership of Minister Simon Corbell the report provides the people of the ACT with a comprehensive understanding of the performance of the ACT health system against a range of targets and benchmarks. The minister did not have to produce this new report. He could have continued with the variety of reports that covered only part of the picture and which did not show trends or performance against targets and benchmarks.
But the minister, like the rest of this government, does not just pay lip-service to the notion of accountability to the people whom he serves. The minister regularly reports to the people of the ACT on how their health system is performing in the key areas of our health services. The report does show that there are areas where we do need to do more. Without the new report we would not know about emergency department waiting times or access block results. The report is valuable because it shows the government is serious about accountability. It is very clear to everyone who reads the report how our services are performing. It is also a very handy instrument for measuring how the government’s initiatives are improving access to care.
Let us not forget about our achievements to date. On achieving office ACT Labor had to immediately inject almost $9 million into the hospital system just to keep it going. In our first budget we provided almost $12 million to increase the salaries of our health professionals, who were poorly neglected under the previous government. We restructured the health portfolio so that it could plan and implement services in a strategic manner that met the needs of the entire community.
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