Page 2161 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
That was said on Triple 6 on 16 June. Here we have the minister for contradiction because last December Ms Gallagher said:
I do not have a problem at all, at times of pressure and based on appropriate clinical decisions, with the beds that are provided in the emergency management unit being used if required.
That is from the Hansard of 4 December 2007. In the terminology of the public health system, a bed is much more than a physical bed; it is understood as having staff attached to provide treatment. When a patient is admitted to a hospital for an emergency, that denotes being admitted to a ward with the appropriate specialist care. Of course, in the television series Yes, Minister, which we are all aware of, the joke was about a government that provided a hospital full of beds but no-one to staff it.
Despite all the fanfare of this massive health budget, we continue to see failure after failure in regard to the appropriate management of patients. As revealed by the opposition last December, the ACT government has indeed been shuffling patients from one section of the emergency department to another meant for 24-hour care and observation only. This had the effect of making it seem as if these patients were actually admitted to ward beds, as I have just said. This Stanhope government has form in revising down targets in an attempt to meet them.
In the area of elective surgery, there continues to be considerable distress and inconvenience to patients. Only 37 per cent of patients for elective surgery rated category 2, or semi-urgent, needing admission within 90 days, were receiving surgery within that time, which represented a deterioration of around 13 per cent on the preceding quarter. Of those deemed non-urgent, 71.6 per cent were being admitted to surgery inside a year. So nearly 30 per cent of elective surgery category 3 patients are waiting more than a year—the longest wait in Australia. So much for record funding in health.
The recent Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report showed that half of the people taken off the ACT’s waiting list—and this is really important and worthy of note—had either died or become otherwise uncontactable. The government never comes clean on this fact. The government’s typical approach is nicely—or should I say horribly—exemplified by the provision in this budget of a paediatric emergency department waiting area at a cost of $500,000, to be completed in June 2009, with a spend of $250,000 in this financial year. Instead of finding solutions to the steadily worsening waiting lists, this government elects to make waiting more comfortable for one group of patients. No-one is disputing that children and their parents are not deserving, but it follows that waiting areas should therefore be improved for all patients, particularly given that this government’s mismanagement is causing people to wait extremely long periods.
If it were not so serious, it would be amusing. This is not even a bandaid solution. It is no solution at all to the long waiting times of eight hours or more which are now standard in the ACT’s emergency departments. It is just another papering over of the deep-seated problems and constitutes an admission that the government has no plan to reduce excessive waiting times.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .