Page 3280 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 13 November 2007
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at least good service. However, as it is the case with many other areas of government, this simply is not the case in the ACT. In fact, despite the high cost, the waiting times in public hospitals in the ACT are the highest in the country. On almost every measure in relation to waiting times available in the report of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the ACT performs the poorest out of every Australian jurisdiction.
We have the highest median waiting time for elective surgery; we have the highest proportion of patients waiting for more than a year for elective surgery; we have the lowest proportion of patients receiving timely treatment in emergency surgery. It is just extraordinary that the minister gets up here and berates her opposite number and says, “How dare you raise questions.” She has a responsibility to this legislature to pursue these issues when such extraordinarily poor figures are out there compiled by an independent agency that is putting it fairly and squarely on the territory government that, in fact, the performance is substandard.
I have pursued these figures in other speeches in more detail in the Assembly, Mr Speaker. However, I would like today to discuss some of the other information on ACT public hospitals, particularly in the category of potentially preventable hospitalisations. Amongst some of the other information contained in the report of the AIHW, there are statistics for potentially preventable hospitalisations. These are hospitalisations that are thought to be avoidable if timely and adequate non-hospital care is provided. Rates for potentially preventable hospitalisations are a potential indicator of how effective non-hospital care would be to reduce the strain on hospitals. This is particularly important in a jurisdiction like the ACT, where hospital waiting times are the highest in Australia. Just as we should not be using our public hospitals as a substitution for the lack of aged care and having people in there at roughly three times the daily price, we also need to look more aggressively at ways in which we keep people out of hospitals. Any means of reducing the problem should be seriously considered.
If you look at the Australia-wide figures, the rate of potentially preventable hospitalisations in 2005-06 was 9.3 per cent of all separations. The rate per 1,000 people in the population has been increasing steadily since 2001-02 by an average of 2.9 per cent per annum. Out of those diseases that can be prevented by vaccination, the number of separations per 1,000 people has decreased by an average of 5.7 per cent per annum. This shows that there are means of prevention that are reducing the instance of hospitalisation for some specific areas. However, overall, the rate of potentially preventable hospitalisation is, in fact, going up.
Unfortunately, figures on preventable hospitalisation are not necessarily a measure of the effectiveness of the health management of the government alone. The trends are, of course, I acknowledge, also affected by the health decisions of individuals and the changing nature of the health problems that face us from generation to generation. I know, Mr Speaker, you do your running to try and ensure that you are not an early admission to hospital—except possibly from an ankle strain—but the fact of the matter is that there are, of course, many lifestyle decisions that could help us reduce those health costs that people are not adhering to. Nonetheless, by looking at preventable hospitalisations, we can certainly identify areas of potential savings—
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