Page 459 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 13 February 2013
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experience as a mother of four children has been totally at odds with this performance claim, as have been the experiences of numerous constituents reporting to me during the election period.
I have never waited less than four hours to see my children treated in emergency, and the experience reported to me again and again by distraught parents has been that waiting in emergency at the Canberra Hospital for five or six hours is commonplace. Can you imagine the stress on a sick child to spend six hours in the middle of the night in a cold waiting room filled with sick strangers? Emergency department waiting rooms are not the peaceful waiting areas of kindly family doctors. On any given day there are distressed patients of all kinds. It is not uncommon to see loud and angry exchanges between sick or injured people who have waited for hours and hours and overworked hospital staff behind their high protective barriers. I note that during my last visit to the emergency department there were no fewer than three signs reminding patients that aggressive behaviour towards the hospital staff is inappropriate, which I agree with, but it says something about the stressful place that the hospital emergency department can be.
On one occasion I waited for four hours with a sick child until the early hours of the morning and finally was forced to leave because of the horrific wait without my child being treated. During last year’s election campaign, one mother related to me that she waited over six hours for treatment at Canberra Hospital to have a piece of glass removed from her eye, which was actually lacerating the cornea of her eye. Whilst doorknocking in another area of Gungahlin, a mother told me that she had waited so many hours with her sick child that she has actually decided that next time her child is sick she will drive to a hospital in Sydney as it will be faster.
According to our own performance report, only 57 per cent of patients spend less than four hours in emergency, but I think even that is a highly questionable statistic. Let us face it—we have had something of a struggle with the concept of factual reporting under this minister. I am certainly not surprised the targets have just been changed so that we might have some hope of achieving them. I have little confidence that even these modest targets will be achieved.
If we look at the statistics for ACT Health against the national triage data nationally, category 1 patients are seen 100 per cent on time, category 2 patients are seen 80 per cent on time and, overall, categories 1 to 5 are seen 72 per cent on time. However, the ACT is seriously lagging. If we compare, as the Chief Minister suggested, our data to that of Queensland—the data that we have available—we see we are still lagging and not improving. In category 2 the ACT in 2010-11 had 78 per cent of patients seen on time and Queensland had the same figure. But as we move on to 2011-12 it was 76 per cent in the ACT versus 82 per cent in Queensland. For category 3, in the ACT, 48 per cent only seen on time in 2010-11 and Queensland, 60 per cent. But moving on to 2011-12, category 3 in the ACT is 50 per cent—a slight improvement—but Queensland also has had an improvement to 63 per cent, which we have not managed to catch up to.
In 2010-11 category 4 in the ACT was 48 per cent and Queensland, 67. Moving on to 2011-12 figures, we have gone backwards, going down to 47 per cent, while Queensland have gone ahead to 69 per cent. In 2010-11 category 5 in the ACT is 75
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