Page 120 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 16 February 2011
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provide 10,700 elective surgery operations in our public hospitals—another record year—and a 9.5 per cent increase on the previous year’s total.
Between January and November 2010 the number of people waiting beyond recommended waiting times fell by 21 per cent. In urology, which was an area where we had significant numbers of long-wait patients, we have seen a 62 per cent reduction in the number waiting longer than recommended between March and December 2010. That is a 62 per cent improvement in just nine months. This has been achieved by increasing access to surgery for urology patients and recruiting additional urologists to the region. All of these steps were put in place well before the audit began. We expect a continued improvement in the number of long waits over the remainder of this financial year as we continue to focus on improving access to surgery for people with extended waiting times.
We have our public hospitals running at full capacity for elective surgery and we have contracted services to the private sector to further increase the opportunity for people to get the surgery they need. We have committed to continue record levels of access to surgery into 2012 and 2013 in order to dramatically reduce the number of people waiting too long for care. As part of this aim, we hope to continue the partnership with the private sector and into the future to ensure that we maximise access to elective surgery. There are always improvements we can make in the way we manage and report on access to elective surgery, but elective surgery is only part of a full range of surgical services provided to the community.
Our hospitals, particularly the Canberra Hospital, have to balance the demand for surgery between emergency and elective surgery based on the levels of resources available. Responding to demand for emergency surgery will always be the highest priority, and increases in demand for emergency surgery will inevitably impact on the ability to manage and deliver elective surgery, because, to a large degree, emergency surgery involves the same staff, same operating theatres and the same beds as elective surgery.
There has been a significant increase in demand for emergency surgery in recent years. Over the three-year period noted in the audit, emergency surgical activity increased by 18.4 per cent overall and at the Canberra Hospital by over 20 per cent. This is a considerable increase over a relatively short time.
Hospital infrastructure is like an aircraft carrier; it is big and bulky, takes a long time to build and cannot expand beyond its capacity. While we have added three new theatres to the Canberra Hospital, it is not easy to absorb a 21 per cent increase in theatre activity in three years without feeling the strain. Yet our hospitals have also managed to increase elective surgery activity up from 9,300 procedures to 9,778 procedures in 2009-10.
This growth in both emergency and elective surgery is continuing, with our hospitals reporting a 10.8 per cent increase in total surgical activity over the five months of the financial year compared to the same period last year. This has not just been achieved by adding extra buildings and equipment; the main driver behind the extra work is the considerable investment we have made in attracting highly skilled and qualified clinicians to the public hospital.
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