Page 453 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 13 February 2013
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(3) calls on the Minister to detail to the Assembly the Government’s plan to improve access to the emergency departments by the last sitting day in March 2013.”.
There are a couple of points to this amendment. The first part is to note that the government has invited the Auditor-General to carry out a review 12 months after the completion of the performance report to review progress with implementation of the recommendations. I think that provides a very clear point of scrutiny from the Auditor-General to assess whether that first set of recommendations has been implemented. I think it is important that there is space provided for recommendations that have already been made to be implemented and then assess whether they have worked. That is part of the rationale of my approach today.
That leads me to the second point, which is to have the health minister detail to the Assembly the government’s plan to improve access to the emergency department back to the Assembly. As I think Mr Hanson said at the start of his speech, it is a genuine attempt to improve performance. If the health minister, the Chief Minister, comes into the Assembly and provides the government’s strategy, a clear strategy, to outline what the intended steps are in light of some of the recent issues—the Chief Minister identified some of those in her speech today when she said that health department staff have indicated that they may have dropped the ball on something; they had other distractions going on—then we can actually have a discussion. Mr Hanson probably knows the health topic rather better than I do; I am still a learnee on this portfolio. Then we can sit here and critically analyse whether those steps, in fact, address the concerns that are held. I think that is a good basis for the Assembly to proceed on a discussion.
The Greens would like to see more work done to address ways to reduce the pressure on our hospitals and, in particular, for this motion, our emergency rooms. We know there is a huge amount of pressure on our emergency staff. However, this is not necessarily an indicator of a poorly run facility. I think all members of this place would agree that it is vital that the emergency department runs as efficiently as possible. As Ms Bresnan said many times in the previous Assembly, we do not want to devote huge amounts of government resources to evaluating artificial key performance indicators that do not actually address the key issues, such as reducing the number of people using emergency in the first case, for instance.
We believe in finding solutions to the problems. It is clear there are problems facing emergency departments right around Australia. We already know that waiting times are longer than people expect and that the health system is struggling in some areas to respond to our ageing population and the increasingly complex needs presented to the emergency department. We understand that nobody wants to wait for an extended time in the emergency room to receive treatment, but I do not think that the length of time that people have to wait is at the heart of the issue. Whether all the people that are there actually need to be there or could be treated elsewhere more efficiently is vital to know, as well as working towards longer term health solutions, such as older people having regular health checks and access to equipment at home and clinics.
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