Page 2657 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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per cent. But in response to a question I asked on notice during estimates, I note that that rate has now escalated to 15 per cent. So the number of people per capita waiting longer than a year is five times the national average.
We know that patients who have been classified as 2a—meaning that they should have their surgery within 60 days—have actually been waiting longer than a year. I will relate the story of Allan McFarlane and what his carer said:
Miss Arrold is at a loss to understand why Mr McFarlane, who moved into aged-care accommodation last year, is still waiting for surgery. “I just thought, you know, we’ve got lots of money to spend on bicycle paths and bits of art and things like that, but we can’t get him in to have an operation.”
And it is a question well asked by his carer.
This is a sensitive political issue, Mr Speaker; there is no question about that. In recent times we have seen the minister boasting that, amongst this terrible news for the ACT, urgent patients—that is, those who are meant to be seen within 30 days—are being seen on time. In fact, the boast is that about 95 per cent of those urgent patients, category 1 patients, are operated on in time. But when we look at the facts, we need to understand the way those lists are being managed. The annual report says that 94 per cent of category 1 patients are seen on time. I have a list of press releases here that I could go through—and I am happy to table them later—that show the government boasting that category 1 patients being seen on time are at least in the order of 95 per cent.
On Tuesday of last week in the Assembly, we asked the minister a number of questions about this. The minister denied there were any cases that she was aware of where patients were being downgraded from their elective surgery. This was in response to an article that had run earlier in the week where claims were made that that was the case. The article, with respect to an elective surgery patient, Mr Wentworth, stated:
After being told his operation would … take place at the end of May, Mr Wentworth rang ACT Health two weeks ago to inquire if a surgery date had been set.
“They said, ‘Oh you’re being downgraded,’” Mr Wentworth told the Canberra Times.
“I asked why I wasn’t informed and the comment was that anyone who isn’t operated on in the 30 days, the hospital downgrades.
“I was absolutely flabbergasted. I was a bit upset over this issue because I wasn’t informed.”
Peter Hughes from the ACT Visiting Medical Officers Association said he believed administrative staff in ACT 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,”…
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