Page 2889 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 2013
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Indeed, the concern we have is with some of the decisions made by government, and I will go through those now. Recommendation 57 of the estimates report stated:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government advise the Assembly why the ACT has the longest emergency department waiting times in the country and why ACT waiting times have deteriorated so significantly.
And certainly they have. Any analysis of waiting times from back in 2001 when Labor took office to now would show a significant deterioration in those waiting times. And when you compare them with other jurisdictions you can see that, where those jurisdictions have put the effort in, there has been significant improvement.
Recommendation 58 was:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government provide details to the Assembly on the key lessons learnt from Western Australia’s successful implementation of the emergency department four-hour length of stay rule.
I am encouraged to see that the government has agreed to that. I think that it is good that the government is looking at other jurisdictions. And I note that the Chief Minister—I cannot recall whether she has gone or is intending to go to look at some emergency departments elsewhere—is going to look at what other jurisdictions are doing. I support her doing that. It is in the near future. It is here in the report.
I think it is clear that there are problems in our emergency department. They are complex issues. They are not issues necessarily just within the ED. It is about the inflow in terms of the number of patients and it is about things like bed numbers. It is repeatedly said to me that that is the key issue for ED. There are a whole range of issues, locations of walk-in centres—and I will get to that in a minute—and so on. So it is a very complex issue. There is a lot to be learned.
That is why I have repeatedly said, “Let’s have an Auditor-General review of this.” And it is not just saying, “Let’s just have the Auditor-General look at the ED and the flows within the ED,” but it is a look at the systems, a look at the flows in and out. And it is making sure that there is a holistic view and it is a view that is not tarnished by, I guess, any sort of prejudice that has to defend policies that were not working or that we were immune to looking at where it is working in other jurisdictions.
As I have said before, when the Auditor-General did a review of elective surgery we saw that there was a report that was then published that did come up with, I think, 11 very good recommendations that were of use to the government and provided that focus. So I have continued to call for that. When you look at the latest national health performance results released on 25 July for the first quarter of 2013, they show that 53 per cent of patients were seen within the recommended four-hour time frame, but the target was 65 per cent.
TCH is not getting as close as Calvary. I think Calvary are getting a bit closer. There are probably some reasons for that—the way that Calvary are doing their business—but obviously there is a more complex nature of trauma and so on that TCH has to
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