Page 172 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 16 February 2011
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MR SMYTH: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Minister, the Auditor-General found in her report on elective surgery and waiting lists that “the strategies implemented by ACT Health have not been adequate to address increased demand”. Why are the strategies you have implemented inadequate to address waiting lists?
MS GALLAGHER: The Auditor-General has formed a view on that, and I respect that view. However, I think there is acknowledgment in the report of the work that is being done to increase throughput, to build extra capacity, to employ extra surgeons—and the demand continues to grow.
Mr Smyth: But the waits are getting longer.
MS GALLAGHER: Thank you, Mr Smyth. So we have increased capacity; we have increased beds in the hospital. Part of this is that, as I said before, you cannot just say that we are going to do a thousand more procedures this year and not have 50 additional beds in the hospital to take all those patients that you are going to do—significantly expanding your intensive care unit, for example, and having the extra pathology staff on. You cannot just snap your fingers. This is complex work that takes a long time to resolve.
Over that five years, we have increased capacity. I think that five years ago we would have been doing 6½ thousand procedures a year. We are now doing 10,000. This year we will do 10,700. But despite all those gains, demand for elective surgery continues to grow in this city. We have some constraints about how we manage that. We do not have elective surgery centres where we can send everybody and their surgery will be done and it will not be cancelled due to emergency work. We do not have the capacity of larger jurisdictions that have numerous hospitals that role-delineate across specialties. We do not have those options. That provides this system with some constraints. It will not change until we grow into a city the size of Melbourne, which is not going to happen.
For example, we have three plastic surgeons. Many, many people having elective surgery need plastic surgery, but we have to work that in with those plastic surgeons and the amount of work that they can fit in with their private work. (Time expired.)
MR HANSON: A supplementary?
MR SPEAKER: Yes, Mr Hanson.
MR HANSON: Minister, why have median waiting times for elective surgery nearly doubled since Labor took office?
MS GALLAGHER: Median waiting times have doubled because we have had for certainly the past three years a focus on removing long waits off our list, and that affects median waiting times. For political expediency, I could give a directive to ACT Health that they are only to remove new additions to the list and our median waiting time would be halved in a couple of months. Would that be the right thing to do? No, it would not because median waiting times ignore the tail.
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