Page 1076 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 30 March 2011
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press release titled “More elective surgery, busy emergency department and Walk-in Centre success in quarterly report”.
The minister’s foreword to the quarterly report is quite extensive, and both the foreword and the press release present a very positive view of health outcomes here in the ACT. In fact, there is not one single negative statement in either document. The minister’s foreword starts with the statement:
The ACT Public Health Services report for the first six months of 2011 shows that the increased investment in the Territory’s public health services is working to provide improved access to care.
It then goes on to list a number of statistics which are selectively cherry picked from the report to back up her claim that the report shows, using her words, “the increased investment is working to provide improved access to care”. But the question is whether her claim is true or false, because if you read the report in detail it is very clear that the increased investment is not working and access to care is generally deteriorating.
I do not deny that there are positive results and there are negative. But across the board, when you compare the minister’s statement with the facts in the report, it is quite clear there is a discrepancy. And what it shows is that the minister’s claims are false. She has cherry picked only the statistics that support those claims, and it has been done quite clearly, intentionally, to mislead the public and to deceive them into believing that the public health system is actually providing better access to care than is the reality.
I think people do expect a little bit of gloss from ministers and from politicians, but they also expect a minister to be fundamentally honest with them and not to deliberately attempt to deceive them in such a blatant way. I have reviewed the outcomes in the report that relate to access to care, and this is what I have found.
Firstly, when it comes to elective surgery, people are waiting longer across the board. For category 1 patients, urgent cases who are meant to have surgery within 30 days, the waiting time has increased by one day from the same period last year, and the number of patients who are receiving their surgery on time has dropped four percentage points from 93 to 89, and this is a decline from 95 per cent in the previous year.
For category 2 semi-urgent patients who are meant to be seen within 90 days, there has been a deterioration of two days since last year, and a deterioration of 11 days since 2007-08, and for category 3 patients this has been even more stark; they are waiting 43 days longer than last year. So across the board it is all longer waiting times for elective surgery. Access to care is not improving, the median wait time has deteriorated seven days since last year, and the proportion of patients who have had their surgery postponed has increased since last year. The number of patients waiting longer than one year has also increased by nearly 100 from last year. Last year, 645 people were waiting longer than a year; now it is 739. So in what sense is access to
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