Page 1996 - Week 07 - Thursday, 13 August 2020
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Mrs Dunne talked about the quarterly performance reports. Of course, what she did not say was that the performance was improving. The quarter 1 report for 2019-20 showed performance was improving. I was quite surprised that I was not asked about elective surgery in relation to the quarter 2 report. It was probably the most disappointing figure that I saw—the increase in the number of people who were overdue for elective surgery in that report. The interesting thing about that is that the number is counted, as I understand it, when people have their surgery. When more people who are overdue have surgery, the number of people who are overdue in the report, in the data point, increases. It is a strange thing. I do not understand why that is the way it is, but it is an interesting piece of data.
The only other point I would make in relation to our investment in elective surgery over this period—again, comparing the number of people on the ACT public hospital elective surgery waiting lists prior to the impact of COVID-19—is that it was lower in 2018-19 than it was in 2014-15 or, indeed, compared to 2009-10.
Our investment in surgical activity in the 2018-19 budget—again, where we delivered in 2018-19 more than 14,000 elective surgeries—reduced the waitlist from about 5,500 to around 5,100. Yes, we have some catching up to do, but in 2018-19 the ACT was first when it came to timeliness in cardiothoracic surgery, second for vascular surgery, third for neurosurgery and equal with the national average for neurological, plastic and reconstructive surgery.
Are there challenges in some areas? Absolutely, there are challenges in some areas. We are working really hard, and Canberra Health Services is working really hard, under the excellent leadership of Bernadette McDonald, to address those challenges. To say that we are not keeping up, that we are going backwards or that our investment—this investment of $30 million to catch up on elective surgery and outpatients—somehow is not real money or is not going to catch up is just not true. It is a misrepresentation of the data.
We can always do better, and we will continue to do better. But the fact is that we have been doing better over the last five years and the last 10 years, and that is what we will continue to do. We will continue to invest. We will continue to improve. Canberrans know that only an ACT Labor government will continue to deliver the investments that we need to see better health care for our community—better care, closer to home.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong) (4.53): I rise today to respond to the motion put forward by Mrs Dunne regarding the importance of elective surgery. I think it is fair to say that all of us here in the Assembly want to ensure that Canberrans receive high quality health care. Access to quality and timely health care matters to everyone and, whilst there are indeed complexities and difficulties to achieve this for every individual in the hospital system, on the whole our view is that the ACT healthcare system does demonstrate improving data.
Elective surgery, as the motion references, is one of those areas where the ACT has continued to improve year on year. Of course, as has been canvassed in the debate, the
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