Page 1989 - Week 07 - Thursday, 13 August 2020

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(2) further notes the:

(a) continuous failure of the Labor/Greens Government to keep abreast of the demand for elective surgery and the adverse impact this is having on the health of the Canberra community;

(b) growing number of Canberrans waiting longer than clinically indicated for elective surgery; and

(3) calls on the ACT Government to address the chronic backlog in elective surgery.

Elective surgery wait times are one of the key performance indicators of any public health system in Australia. It is important to reflect on why elective surgery is important and what it is. A lot of people might think that elective surgery is the sort of stuff where you might have a nip, a tuck, a nose job or something like that. It is not. Elective surgery is any surgery conducted in a hospital which is not absolutely emergency surgery for a lifesaving purpose.

Most people go onto an elected surgery waiting list under one of three categories: urgency 1, 2 or 3. That means that they should be seen ideally in 30 days, 90 days or a year. That is the clinically advisable time for them to do so. The ACT government is constantly falling behind on this measure and has performed poorly on this measure for a long time.

If we look at the latest quarterly performance report, for the third quarter of the 2019-20 financial year, the last available information, we see that there were 889 people overdue for surgery on 31 March 2020. This is a 13½ per cent increase from the previous year. There were 3,097 surgeries performed in the third quarter of 2019-20. That is 390 fewer surgeries than in the second quarter, a fall of 11.2 per cent. There were 372 people added to the waiting list in the third quarter, which was a decline of 302 from the second quarter. But the elective surgery waiting list grew by 88 over the period.

The Minister for Health will claim that the poor performance in the third quarter is due to COVID-19. However, we have to remember that the COVID-19 shutdown to elective surgery happened at the very end—the very end, the last couple of weeks—of that quarter. The ACT’s poor performance in elective surgery clearly pre-dates COVID-19.

If you look at the performance targets for 2018-19, you will see that the ACT missed its targets in all three categories. The government will claim that there has been some improvement. The minister alluded to that today: that there was some improvement in 2018-19. However, this improvement has not been sustained into 2019-20. And the problems were becoming evident well before COVID-19 hit.

There has been a significant upward trend in the ACT for elective surgery waiting times over the life of the Barr government. The former Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope,

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