Page 117 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 16 February 2011
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The strategies implemented by ACT Heath have not been adequate to address increased demand, and reduce the waiting lists for elective surgery.
Who does the minister blame for the inadequate strategies? Is she going to take some responsibility herself or does she blame somebody else? Elective surgery waiting lists have nearly doubled since ACT Labor took office and are appalling when compared to other states. We saw this with the release of the MyHospitals website in December last year.
When looking at the categories across both public hospitals, of the 82 categories for elective surgery only six actually performed above the national average benchmark, and more than 60 categories are well below—indeed, many are the worst in the nation.
Results for emergency departments were not much better. If you look at the Canberra Hospital, where we are meant to be reaching benchmarks for urgent and semi-urgent categories, where people are seen within 75 per cent of the time frames—that is 30 minutes and 60 minutes respectively—the times that people are seen are within 47 per cent for urgent and 43 per cent for semi-urgent. This is well below normal accepted categories, well below hospitals like Liverpool in Sydney’s west or St Vincent’s in the city.
I remind you, Mr Speaker, that although it is 47 per cent and 43 per cent now, when this government took office it was above 75 per cent of the nationally recognised standard. Again, under ACT Labor we have seen almost a halving in the effectiveness of our emergency department at the Canberra Hospital.
These are statistics but, as an example, last week I spoke to the very upset parent of a five-year-old girl who had waited for 16 hours in the emergency department of the Canberra Hospital. He described to me a scene of chaos and misery at the emergency department. It was a scene of overstretched doctors and nurses who simply could not cope, of poor, and in some cases a total lack of, communication with patients.
His five-year-old girl had cut her hand and she waited 16 hours to get two stitches. Late last year we saw the tragic case of an 81-year-old grandmother who waited for 13 hours in the emergency department across two days after suffering a stroke. I get numerous complaints of this sort. Many people do not want their cases made public, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. What is clear is that after nine years of ACT Labor, and nearly five years of Ms Gallagher as the minister, by any measure, she has proved entirely ineffective.
These are just the issues since we have last met in this Assembly, but let me remind you of the ongoing problems that we face in our health system. We have an absolute crisis in GP numbers in this town. Behind the Northern Territory, which has some unique circumstances, we have the lowest number of GPs per capita in Australia. This is a minister who said only a short number of years ago that this was not her responsibility at all. It is only because of the pressure that has been applied by the opposition, by the community and by the media that this government decided to take some action. But it is proving ineffective and far too late to solve this problem.
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