Page 694 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 11 February 2009
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It is just a fact that in health systems the time to report and the checking of data to make sure that it is absolutely accurate means that there are quite substantial delays in making that information public. That is not an excuse from me; that is the case with those national reports.
In relation to category 1 patients, hospitals admitted 93 per cent of category 1 patients within the national standard of 30 days. This figure was the second best in the country and above the national average of 88 per cent within 30 days. I should say that category 1 patients must be seen within 30 days. At Canberra Hospital, 50 per cent of our work on any given day of the week is emergency work.
We have to do the emergency work as it comes in the door. That is 50 per cent of the surgical load on any day. The fact that we are getting 93 per cent of category 1 patients within 30 days is a very good result. That was the case in 2006-07 in the published data. In 2007-08—this data has not been published—96 per cent of category 1 patients were admitted within 30 days. Again, that is a substantial improvement.
These are the areas that we have been working on in terms of removing our long waits from the list. We do not want people waiting longer than they need to for surgery. I have prioritised the long waits and that has resulted in my taking quite a lot of criticism about the waiting times when it is reported that, for example, the waiting time is 62 days. That is a measurement relating to people who have been removed from the list, not people who are on the list.
In fact, people who were on the list can be seen much more quickly than that, and often are. We are dealing with the long waits, the people who have been waiting a long time for surgery. That may be due to doctor shortage, the nature of clinical decisions that have been taken about the urgency of their operation—a whole range of factors. The 989 people that were on the waiting list in December 2007, who had been waiting longer than a year, has dropped in one calendar year by 30 per cent because of our focus on people who have been waiting too long.
I am very confident that elective surgery is going well. It will take some years, I think, to bring those reported waiting times down. Because they are reported based on the numbers removed from the list, we are focusing on long waits. Because that data is two years old, it will take some time for the improvements to show up, but things are certainly improving.
We are also working in partnership with the commonwealth. We will have two extra operating theatres open, hopefully, by the end of this year and an extra operating theatre that is due to open pretty shortly at Calvary. Again, this will just include our theatre resources and ensure that our emergency operations can go ahead but not necessarily at the expense of our elective lists.
I know that the GP issue was really big in the election and I know that it is a big issue in the community. It is very easy to lay the blame for a GP shortage at the feet of the ACT government. I can certainly say genuinely that the powers to increase GP numbers lie not with the ACT government. They lie with the commonwealth and I
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