Page 4926 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 28 November 2018
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Through extra funding in last year’s budget review, Canberra Health Services completed 13,344 surgeries—the second highest on record—and was able to reduce the number of people waiting longer than clinically recommended, from 464 to 406 patients by the end of June 2018. In addition, CHS has decreased the number of people on the wait list by nine per cent, from 5,322 to 4,867 at the end of June 2018.
When it comes to the ED, demand continues to grow each year. The number of presentations to Canberra Hospital increased from 85,093 in 2016-17 to 88,661 in 2017-18. This represents a four per cent increase. Calvary ED saw around 59,000 presentations, a growth of around one per cent. I have acknowledged that from 2016-17 to 2017-18 there was a drop in the proportion of presentations seen on time. In part this was due to one of the worst flu seasons on record, another fact the opposition want to deny. This, among other factors, impacted on the 2017-18 performance. This is not want I want to see nor what I expect as minister. That is why in this year’s budget I made sure to deliver funding for additional front-line staff.
Under the leadership of the new CEO, CHS is taking a whole-of-hospital approach to access and patient flow and reviewing our processes in relation to the discharge stream in the ED admission to wards in the hospital and patient discharge from the inpatient hospital setting. This should result in further improvements in ED timeliness and is a high priority for CHS to achieve improvements each quarter.
The budget also delivered nearly $65 million for more elective and emergency surgeries. This will allow us to deliver around 14,000 elective surgeries each and every year.
The opposition has taken some interest in recent months regarding maintenance at Canberra Hospital. As members know, it is a busy tertiary hospital campus and the largest in our region, providing care to more than 500,000, including acute inpatient day services, outpatient, women’s and children’s, paediatrics and pathology. It is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. Of course it will require maintenance from time to time.
Just yesterday the opposition spokeswoman stated that the government does not want to think about hospital infrastructure and certainly does not want to build a new one. Well, with an investment of $500 billion and over $400 million already provisioned in our budget for infrastructure, including the commitment to build the new SPIRE centre, this is wrong. There is money in the budget.
There have been two years of intensive planning. The opposition are wrong, and I invite Mrs Dunne to acknowledge that in this place and in public. We are absolutely committed to building and delivering the SPIRE centre and the services it needs to continue to meet the needs of the people of the Canberra region. SPIRE is making very good progress. It is a complex and highly sophisticated expansion of our public hospital to futureproof our health system for many years to come. As members know, SPIRE is due to begin construction in 2020. Important planning work has been undertaken at a territory-wide level with key stakeholders at Canberra Hospital,
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