Page 444 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 13 February 2013
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The government’s own ED strategy said that if you put the walk-in centre at the hospital it will put pressure on the emergency department because everyone is going to come to the walk-in centre. A lot of people will not be able to be treated there. They will get referred off to ED, and that is exactly what has happened. That was the advice of health department officials and that was ignored by the government. The extended waiting times, the long waits for elective surgery, cause problems because people with chronic illness end up repeatedly in ED and get admitted to hospital.
In relation to the data doctoring, the health minister has admitted now that because the doctoring occurred there was a false impression about how our EDs were performing. The government—indeed, the opposition and everyone in the community—thought they were actually improving. That was not true and as a result action that should have been taken two years ago was not taken. So we are now well behind the eight ball.
Some of the recent increases in performance of waiting times are directly attributable to the fact that money was not put into the budget a couple of years ago to address that decline. There may well be other factors and that is why I want this referred to the Auditor-General to look into.
We put forward a number of policies to address problems with ED, as the government did. There are some that we consider are still of merit that the government is not introducing. Notably, I mention having a preventive health strategy and a task force to address some of those chronic illness problems, the $5 million of support for GPs that we had, and the urgent care clinics in the suburbs so we have doctors and nurses working together to keep people out of the EDs, particularly for the low acuity so that they are not clogging up the system.
I want the Auditor-General to come in because the government has repeatedly said that it is going to fix the problem and it has not. I will provide some quotes. In 2008 in the Canberra Times the minister said, “So while our emergency department staff provide very efficient care, we need to improve patient flows out of our emergency departments in order to improve waiting times.”
In 2009 she said, “I recognise that access block is an area that requires further attention and the government is working on this.” But there were no improvements to correlate with those expressions. So the government was saying, the minister was saying, “We are on it; we are fixing it.” Then the results come out and there is another decline.
In 2011, the same thing happened. The minister said, “The government would also ensure that 70 per cent of people presenting at the ED were seen within standard waiting times.” No, it is 50 per cent—20 per cent off what the minister said in June 2011. In October 2011 the minister then said that Canberra’s public hospitals were keeping up with increasing demand for services. No, they were not. So there has been a difference between the minister’s statements, which are, “Yes, we know there is a problem but we are fixing it. It is getting better,” when the reality is that it got worse and worse and worse.
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