Page 21 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 February 2016
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Turning to private hospital utilisation, private hospitals will also continue to be an integral partner to address and improve elective surgery times. We will continue to work with our private hospitals in the ACT to support our efforts with these facilities. The government wants to continue to work to see better partnerships with the private sector that make best use of available services and capacity.
We already have a relationship and agreement with Calvary John James which is already now performing public surgeries on behalf of ACT Health. The efforts over past years in relation to additional services, new ways of looking at services and the initiative to establish a partnership with Calvary John James is an example of where we can use our workforce to deliver improved outcomes for patients and provide our surgical workforce with additional capacity.
In addition to local private hospitals, ACT Health already has in place agreements with other hospitals in the region. In March last year I announced a new partnership which will provide local surgical services for New South Wales patients who are currently on the ACT waiting list. The arrangement between ACT Health and the southern New South Wales local health service provides for some low risk elective surgeries for New South Wales based patients to be performed in Queanbeyan and Bega hospitals instead of in the ACT.
There is considerable potential for expanding this approach through further enhancements to services in the region by building the human infrastructure in regional hospitals, such as the doctors and nurses needed, to not only provide additional surgery but also manage the care of patients while they are in hospital recovering from their surgery.
The ACT will be developing a more integrated regional approach that further improves the capacity of public hospitals in the area surrounding the ACT to increase access to surgery, increase the capacity of the regional public hospital system and reduce the number of New South Wales residents requiring surgery in ACT public hospitals.
Let me turn to the issue of recruitment. Without the tireless efforts of our surgical and anaesthetic workforce we do not have an elective surgery service. We will be looking at our workforce planning further to ensure that we have the staff necessary to maintain a high quality service into the future across all clinical areas, including surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses, allied health staff and the staff who support these essential services. For example, we know that demand for orthopaedic surgery and ear, nose and throat surgery has been growing at a rate faster than for most other specialties, and there have also been significant increases in urology surgery, with demand for some urology surgery services doubling over the last four to five years. The government will be mindful of the need to recruit additional skilled doctors, other clinicians and support staff in the right areas to meet the growing demands for care.
As with all industries, when it comes to health care there are constantly new technologies being developed, and we need to stay abreast of these and understand
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