Page 279 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 7 March 2007
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response to the demand that orthopaedic surgeons were experiencing to address some of the needs of their patients.
The access improvement program recently moved on the surgical journey. It will look at how things such as the operating theatre lists work, theatre start times, improving communications across the hospital between the theatres, and how the procedures around day surgery operate. There is a lot of work being done to make sure that we are in a position to meet the needs of our region as the regional hospital, that we are able to deliver on emergency services and that, at the same time, we are able to deliver all the elective surgery that we need to do across the community.
For those who are interested in the elective surgery waiting lists, I have recent data. Mr Smyth, I endeavoured to provide it to your office today as well; that is how recent it is. There was a small increase in the elective surgery waiting list, of 17, over the four months that we were not able to report due to problems with the patient administration system. Your media release could say that the elective surgery list is up by 17, but 17 is not unusual in the sense that that is the figure for December, and at that time, of course, not a lot of elective surgery is performed at the hospital. The people in his office could start drafting the release now.
It is up by 17 but, importantly for those who are waiting for surgery, we have seen a 12 per cent decrease in the long waits, or those who are waiting more than one year. That is still not good enough. There are still too many people in the long waits, but in all of the criteria we have been seeing big improvements over the past year in access to elective surgery.
MS PORTER: Mr Speaker, I ask a supplementary question. How has the government been able to respond to this increase in demand for surgery?
MS GALLAGHER: I thank Ms Porter for the supplementary question. I have outlined some of the ways. We have looked at this very strategically. It is about additional money—that is for sure. In every budget we have provided more money for elective surgery. In this budget we allocated $2.5 million for additional elective surgery, $3 million for additional bed capacity, $1.5 million for additional acute aged care capacity and extra money to increase the capacity of our emergency departments. As I said yesterday, it is about looking across the system, not just a one-solution-fits-all to deliver the outcomes we want to see.
Yesterday I spoke about 126 additional beds. Not all of those beds are in the surgical services area. However, we are seeing that the increase in bed capacity across the system will enable the hospital to deal more flexibly with changes in demand. We have funded additional medical and nursing staff, and the biggest example of this was in the 2004-05 budget where we had $3.2 million to fund additional surgeons. That funding has greatly improved access to emergency general surgery and has reduced some of the waiting times for elective general surgery. This flexibility is required to respond to the changes in demand for services across the system. We are seeing a big increase in emergency surgery demand. But at the same time, while we removed over 4,700 from the waiting list in the first six months, the waiting list remains fairly stable at around 4,720. So the demand still remains and we have to keep working on it.
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