Page 1990 - Week 07 - Thursday, 13 August 2020
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
and his colleague Dr Khalid Ahmed recently performed an analysis of elective surgery wait times over the past six years. Mr Stanhope and Dr Ahmed found that waiting times had increased across Australia. That is true. But their conclusion was:
… the increase in the ACT has outstripped all other jurisdictions and is significantly higher than the national average …
A comparison of the median waiting time in the number of days for half of all patients from 2014-15 to 2018-19 reveals that in aggregate ACT patients waited 17 per cent to 62 per cent longer than patients at the national average.
There are a couple of specialties in the ACT where the performance is even worse.
I noted a couple of weeks ago that the minister tried to downplay Mr Stanhope’s and Dr Ahmed’s categorisation by saying that they only looked at the ones that were really bad rather than the whole of them. I will look at some of the really bad ones.
In orthopaedic surgery, the waiting time in the ACT is 55 per cent higher than for like hospitals across Australia. When we say “like hospitals”, we are comparing apples with apples. We are comparing the Canberra Hospital with its, I think, 19 peer hospitals. We are not comparing it to country hospitals, smaller hospitals or bigger hospitals. We are comparing the Canberra Hospital to like hospitals. We are comparing Calvary Hospital to its peer, I think, 22 hospitals across the country. We are comparing like for like. In orthopaedic surgery, the wait time is 55 per cent higher than in like hospitals across the country.
Recently I had a conversation with an orthopaedic surgeon who does both public orthopaedic work and private orthopaedic work. This is a very experienced, very eminent, very senior orthopaedic surgeon who said to me that people on the public waiting list are infinitely sicker by the time he gets to see them on an operating table than they would be on the private list. People who have private health insurance would not let themselves become so ill as to have their bones so degenerated. He said that for him it is interesting: the work he does on the public list is infinitely more interesting than the private list. But that is because, under this Labor government, the poor people who need orthopaedic surgery get much sicker. Their recovery is much worse; their waiting time for surgery is much more painful; and they may not recover as much as they should because they are not seen in a timely way.
We are 55 per cent worse, and that means that we are infinitely more sick. The people who are paying for this are the working men and women of Canberra who cannot afford private health insurance and who have to lump it on the public waitlists.
In relation to gynaecological surgery, the ACT’s performance is much worse than our peer group hospitals. The number of Canberra women who have waited more than a year for gynaecological surgery was proportionately 425 per cent above the national average.
All these statistics are for the period 2014-15, since the time that Andrew Barr became Chief Minister. The Barr Labor-Greens government does not have a good record
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video