Page 4571 - Week 12 - Thursday, 15 October 2009
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He also said:
The risks we know are greater when people wait longer for treatment, and it is likely that they will suffer pain they didn’t need to suffer.
Minister, what do you say about your handling of the health portfolio to those people who are suffering pain they didn’t need to suffer?
MS GALLAGHER: I am sure Mr Hanson would listen carefully to everything Dr Paul Jones did say this morning in relation to the elective surgery waiting times here in the ACT. I think his comments need to be put in context. In relation to patients suffering from cancer and other serious illnesses, I should remind members of the Assembly that in respect of waits for category 1 surgery, which is to have your surgery within 30 days, the average time here in the ACT is 14 days.
MR SPEAKER: Mr Hanson, a supplementary question?
MR HANSON: Minister, why have median elective surgery rates gone from 39 days to 72 days since your government came to power in 2001?
MS GALLAGHER: There are a number of reasons for that. Demand for elective surgery continues to grow and for the last 2½ years has grown very rapidly. I think we removed 10,107 people from the elective surgery waiting list in the last financial year. More than that joined the list at the same time. I think that when we came into government in 2001 the elective surgery throughput was in the order of 5,000 per year. We have almost doubled the output in terms of elective surgery actually being delivered. A government’s responsibility is to ensure that your throughput continues to grow.
In relation to some of the strategies that we have put in place to manage this, some of it is about extra beds and replacing the 114 beds that were taken out by Mr Smyth and his government when they were in office. I see Vicki is up. She does not like that part of the answer.
Mrs Dunne: I wish to raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The question was: why has the waiting time doubled, not what is the government doing. The minister has not answered the question about why the waiting time has doubled.
MR SPEAKER: There is no point of order.
MS GALLAGHER: We always know on this side we are on a winner when Mrs Dunne jumps up in less than a second. We know something must be said. Some of the other reasons, Mr Speaker, include the strategy that we have implemented in the last two years to remove long-wait patients from the list. In the last year the number of long-wait patients has been reduced by half. We had over 1,000 long-wait patients—that is, patients who had been waiting longer than a year for surgery. The last figure that I have seen is in the order of 500. When you remove 500 people from your list who have been waiting longer than a year it affects your median waiting time.
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