Page 2738 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 13 August 2019
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Another area where the ACT continues to perform poorly is elective surgery. The ACT has had the worst performance in elective surgery for several years now. It has got even worse over the past six months. On 1 October 2018 there were 410 patients overdue for surgery. On 31 March this year that number had grown to 712 patients overdue for surgery. The number of patients overdue for elective surgery has blown out by 74 per cent. It is unlikely that there will be any relief in the fourth quarter of 2018-19. The number of elective surgeries performed in public hospitals could fall as more beds are used for patients presenting at ED.
The Minister for Health will no doubt claim how wonderful the timely healthcare strategy will be. There have been a few healthcare strategies announced by successive health ministers over the years. There are several areas where Canberrans must wait a long time for elective surgery. There is yet to be a strategy that results in a sustained improvement in performance in emergency department and elective surgery waiting times. Once again, there is rhetoric, not action, and this is the hallmark of the Labor-Greens government.
Ear, nose and throat patients wait for 387 days, or over a year. Ophthalmology patients wait for nearly a year, while orthopaedics and plastic surgery patients face long waits as well. However, there has been some relief in the orthopaedics space because there has been some outsourcing to the John James Calvary facility. If a child needs surgery they must wait for over 200 days.
I look forward with eager anticipation to the briefing I am to receive on the timely healthcare strategy and how that strategy is going to be the panacea for all the ACT health system’s waiting time ills. This Labor-Greens government continues to fail in health and continues to fail the people who work in the health system, and it continues to fail the people of the ACT.
Yet another area of failure is the efficiency of health service delivery. The latest data shows that the cost of delivering health services is 120 per cent of the national efficient price and 130 per cent of what it costs to deliver services in peer hospitals. In 2014-15 the average price for an activity unit in the ACT was $6,000, compared to $5,007 for the national weighted average and $4,680 for peer hospitals. That is slightly old data but it is the last data where we can give a proper comparison across the board.
The minister will claim that these are old figures but they are the most recent available. There are no grounds to claim that the situation has improved since then. It is interesting that on a number of occasions when I have asked about approaching the national efficient price it is the practice of health bureaucrats to basically shrug their shoulders, put their hands up in the air in a perplexed way and say, “The ACT will never approach the national efficient price.”
I think that that is true, that there are issues associated with the national efficient price and delivering things in the ACT according to the national efficient price. But it has just become standard: “We can’t do it, so we won’t try.” If the minister tells us again that we are heading in the right direction or that things are on the improve or that we
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