Page 1513 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 June 2007
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MS GALLAGHER: But it is the removals from the list, and in the table it shows you that it is measuring—
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Through the chair, please, members on both sides of the house.
MS GALLAGHER: Mr Deputy Speaker, it is measuring the 9,076 removals from the list who have accessed their surgery—what was the waiting time. If you are actually on the list, you have not had your surgery. How can you have a median measure of the length of time to have your surgery if you are on the waiting list, because you have not had your surgery? That is what I did not understand around the questions that were being put the other day, including by you. The group that is being measured has actually been removed from the list—the throughput. Because we are targeting long waits, those long waits are included in the measure. The median is the midpoint. If you have someone who has waited 700 days for surgery and 600 days, 500 days or 400 days, and then 10 days, 20 days, 30 days, the midpoint is 61 of the removals of the list. That table—it shows, and I think I said, 9,076 removed from the list. You cannot have that measure of the list, because you have not had your access to your surgery and therefore you do not have a waiting time. That was the frustration and confusion around what we were talking about the other day in question time.
Mrs Burke: We were not confused.
MS GALLAGHER: You are not confused now, surely, are you?
Mrs Burke: No, no. We were not confused then; you were confused.
MS GALLAGHER: Yes, you were, because you were thinking it was people on the waiting list waiting for surgery, and it is not; it is removals from the list.
Mrs Burke: You did not understand my question, as you just said yourself.
MS GALLAGHER: I did—I understood—
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mrs Burke and minister, the duelling is over. Through the chair, please.
MS GALLAGHER: Anyway, it is clear from the interjections that people are a little confused. Anyway it is not—
Mrs Burke: Your explanation was as clear as mud.
MS GALLAGHER: It was common sense. I understood it. I accept that those opposite did not understand what I was talking about, and that is my fault. If I was not able to articulate the message, that is my fault. But we have targeted the long waits on the waiting list, and that has seen—for the end of April to this year, people waiting more than one year for elective surgery was 934.
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