Page 175 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 16 February 2011
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MR DOSZPOT: Minister, yesterday you stated that you had “seen evidence of approval being given through the secretary of the private rooms of the doctor”. Is this the evidence you refer to regarding reclassification with approval by doctors?
MS GALLAGHER: Yes, I have seen evidence of communication between private rooms of a surgery and the surgical booking unit. Yes, I have.
MR HARGREAVES: A supplementary, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: Mr Hargreaves, a supplementary.
MR HARGREAVES: Minister, in relation to the Auditor-General’s report on hospital activities, has the government actually put in a response to that inquiry yet?
MS GALLAGHER: No. The government will be, of course, in line with practice, putting together the government’s response to the Auditor-General’s report. I am sure that the public accounts committee will be inquiring into that report as well.
MR SPEAKER: A supplementary, Mr Hanson?
MR HANSON: Minister, why does the ACT continue to compare so unfavourably to other jurisdictions on elective surgery waiting lists and waiting times?
MS GALLAGHER: I think if you look at the Northern Territory and the Tasmanian elective surgery performance—jurisdictions much more our size, facing the same issues—you will see that the ACT does not fare badly when compared to them, and they are small jurisdictions.
Yes, we want to improve our elective surgery performance but we will always have constraints on this system. The constraints are a 600,000-person population; an ageing population; demand for elective surgery continuing to grow; two hospitals, one managed by a non-government provider; no ability to role-delineate; and 30 per cent of work coming from outside our borders. That will always impact, regardless of the political colour or flavour, and I have to say that if Mr Hanson was in this job those constraints would not magically disappear. They make it difficult. The lack of ability to use private providers makes it difficult.
This is the first time that we have been able to employ third-party private providers to do elective surgery work, and that is because the surgeons in the past have not allowed that work to go into the private sector. We have now reached agreement with them that provides us with more opportunities to focus on increasing our throughput, and that is what I intend to do. We are going to increase our throughput.
We will implement the recommendations of the Auditor-General’s review. But implementing those recommendations of the review will not increase procedures by one. Not one extra operation will come out of implementing the Auditor-General’s report. What I need to do is to continue to focus on throughput and make sure that our record years of delivering elective surgery—this year another one, 10,700—continue to grow and we exceed that target next year.
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