Page 2335 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 23 June 2010
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“I was absolutely flabbergasted. I was a bit upset over this because I wasn’t informed.”
Peter Hughes, who is the ACT President of the Visiting Medical Officers Association, is reported as saying:
… he believed administrative staff in Health had been shifting elective surgery patients to lower priority categories than the ones nominated by their doctors.
“This is an illegal stunt that’s done by the administration to try and make their figures look better … It does happen. There’s no doubt about it.”
These are very serious allegations that are being made by a patient and by the President of the Visiting Medical Officers Association. The question is: who is telling the truth? The question is: are lists for category 1 patients, urgent lists, being downgraded? If so, why? Are they being downgraded for clinical reasons—because a doctor says, “Your numbers have gone down. Your risk of getting prostate cancer has lessened; therefore, I will downgrade you from category 1 to category 2”? Or is ACT Health pressuring doctors or in any way manipulating the information to downgrade those lists? Patients have been downgraded not because of clinical reasons, not because their condition is improving, but simply to make the list look better.
Patients are not getting their surgery within 30 days when they are category 1, and they get downgraded to category 2 not because of clinical reasons, but because of other reasons—administrative reasons. The question is: is that occurring? That has been alleged. It has been alleged by a patient that it happened to him. It has been alleged by a doctor that it is occurring. The minister needs to explain very clearly in this chamber what is occurring and why it is occurring.
The minister boasts that 95 per cent of category 1 patients are seen on time. They are the figures that are reported nationally. She is out there boasting that that is the case. But is that actually true or is that a lie? Is the manipulation of the data such that if patients that are listed as category 1 remained category 1 rather than having a downgrade to category 2, that 95 per cent success rate would look significantly worse?
So the question is: what is going on? The minister, I hope, when she addresses this motion will give us a very clear and articulate answer about what is going on in this department and what she knows. She has provided us with some answers in the Assembly to date, and we can look at those. But I must say that there is a complete contradiction between the assertions that she is making—she is saying that there is nothing going on—and those of the doctors. She is saying there is absolutely no evidence of downgrading of elective surgery patients in line with the allegations made by Dr Hughes. She says in an answer to another question:
So it is based on their clinical assessment, and at times if their clinical assessment is that that patient is no longer a category 1 and is a category 2a that is the process that is followed …
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