Page 3055 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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If I can then turn to elective surgery, I think we have to recognise that much of this is a problem that has been created under the current government, that the median waiting time for elective surgery has gone from 40 days to 73 days. I do recognise that there has been a significant increase in demand, but this is a government that has failed to keep up with that increase in demand. It is not just me saying that. I quote from the Auditor-General’s review:
ACT Health conducted an internal review of the outpatient service at TCH and a draft report … found deficiencies in strategic planning, inconsistent application of policies and procedures across the OPDs and ad hoc processes for managing the waiting lists, and poor and inefficient communications with clinicians, consumers and staff.
And probably more damning:
The strategies implemented by ACT Health have not been adequate to address increased demand, and reduce the waiting lists for elective surgery.
So what you are seeing there is the Auditor-General saying quite categorically that the problem that we have with the increasing waiting times is down to Katy Gallagher and that when her government took over there was not a problem. Now there is. There was an increase in demand. We know that there was an increase in demand but there was also an enormous increase in funds that have gone into the health system. It is about how that money has been managed, how that money has been spent. What the Auditor-General has told us is that strategies implemented by ACT Health have not been adequate. So that is disappointing. The minister was asked a lot of questions on the target, and this is a response from her in question time:
… so the target to focus on for how good your elective surgery system is performing needs to be are people having their surgery on time …
And I will quote again from the latest quarterly report. For category 1 patients, their waiting time has increased by one day in comparison to the same period last year. For category 2 patients, it has increased by two days and by 11 days since 2007-08. Category 3 patients are waiting 43 days longer than they were in the same period last year. So you can see that people are waiting longer.
The minister will say, “It’s because we are focusing on the long waits; that is what we are doing that is different.” But back in 2007 she was saying exactly the same thing. In 2007 a press release said:
“The previous Health Minister and myself—
and I imagine that was Simon Corbell—
have asked for all the long waits to be addressed off the waiting list,” she said. “So what we’re seeing is, we are specifically targeting those people who have been waiting more than one year or more than two years for their surgery.”
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