Page 449 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 13 February 2013
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have taken our eye off the ball on timeliness. We have. Last year.” That was because of the pressure they were under. They lost a colleague, a doctor from the emergency department, who died suddenly. Their senior manager was involved in the data doctoring there. They were under pressure in a political year; the biggest contest in health was between Mr Hanson and me on the emergency department doctoring. Let us not forget that and the impact that had on staff.
I met with them in December and they told me, “Yes, we just wanted to get through the year and we took our focus off those business programs that we put in place that were designed to drive down emergency department waiting times.” But they committed to me and they said, “We are refocusing. We are putting new energy in.” They acknowledged that, with the political heat out of their performance, they felt more capable of making some the changes that were required, and they were putting a lot of effort into improving the morale in the workplace based on what was just an unbelievable year for them at Canberra Hospital.
I expect, and I have said this before, that I will see improvements in emergency department waiting times. In the meantime I have been out there defending them and defending their practices. I know the work changes are underway; I know they are. I know that everybody who walks into the emergency department that needs to be seen on time is seen. I know that. Lives are saved in that ED every single day, but, yes, those who are waiting for less urgent attention are waiting too long, and we need to make sure that we are improving that.
I have been up to the federal parliament and I have had meetings with the Minister for Health. I have sought to have our NEAT targets amended based on the data doctoring. We entered those targets, Mr Hanson, under the false belief that our performance was improving, because that was the information I had before me; it was the information the government had before us—that is, the changes we had put in place were working.
A year on we all know that that was not the case and that the improvements were not being seen. So those targets we signed up to needed to be realistic based on what we actually knew the performance of the ED to be. The commonwealth has agreed to us changing our targets and has written to me to that effect. So, instead of 73 per cent of patients in 2013 requiring to be seen within four hours, that will be 65 per cent, and the target in 2014 will be 77 per cent. The challenge in 2015 will be 90 per cent.
In relation to the 800,000, I do not know what representations anyone else in this place has made, but I have been up there trying to protect that money, too. It is not the fact that $800,000 in the health system or the emergency department will change resources significantly—it will not—but the important thing is that I was in there fighting for those staff. They did not deserve to have another loss attributed to their performance in the hospital. It is a hospital-wide issue and it can be solved only by the hospital working together. The commonwealth has agreed that that money will be carried forward and it will be available to the ACT over the four years of the agreement if we meet our targets.
There is a big job ahead of us, but at least we are at a point now where we are setting realistic targets for the performance of the ED. We do not need to put any more
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