Page 1998 - Week 07 - Thursday, 13 August 2020
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patients requiring elective surgery is increasing, just the same as it is in other jurisdictions.
The government has committed to expanding services, with more than $90 million in additional funding since the 2016-17 budget to meet the surgical need and provide quality care. We can see, as the minister has outlined, the target for 2020-21 will be 16,000 elective surgeries delivered, which is a significant increase on the target of 14,250 the previous year. This obviously indicates how Canberra Health Services not only intends to meet increasing demand but also endeavours to catch up on the backlog that has arisen from the postponement of elective surgeries this year.
I simply conclude by noting that we do need to pay close attention to the elective surgery demand in the ACT and ensure that the government is responding appropriately so that those who enter our hospital system can get the quality and timely care that they need. We will not be supporting the text put forward by Mrs Dunne and will be supporting the amendment moved by Minister Stephen-Smith.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.58): I do not think anyone else is speaking, so I will close. The Canberra Liberals are not supporting the government amendment. The government amendment, as you would expect, is a gloss, in the run-up to an election, to try and show just how good they are. But we have to remember that this is an ongoing failure of government.
Let us just think about this. For the $22 million that the government is providing for catch-up for COVID-delayed elective surgery, in accordance with the briefings that I have received, it is expected that it will take a year to catch up on the surgeries that were delayed during the six-week close down as a result of COVID-19. People who were expecting to go to hospital in April before COVID now will have to wait some period—and it may take a year—to be seen. This is not a great achievement.
The minister made great store of the fact that of course we had to put new money into it because we were still paying the staff even though they were not doing elective surgery during that period. That is a reasonable enough point. But not all the cost of elective surgery goes into staff. There is the cost of running the theatres, there is the cost of the sterilisation, and there is the cost, for instance, in orthopaedic surgery, of the prosthetics, which are extraordinarily expensive, which is why orthopaedic surgery is so expensive. There are a lot of costs that were not consumed because they were not staff costs. The minister has not been able to account to the Assembly where that money has gone and how much of the $22 million is just staff costs and where are the savings for sterilisation and prosthetics and the like.
It is interesting that the minister stood up and said, “We have done a whole lot of things that Katy Gallagher suggested we do.” Then she rattled off a list of things. She rattled off a list of, I think, about four things. I did not write them all down at the time. But she mentioned the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children. The Centenary Hospital for Women and Children was opened when Katy Gallagher was the Minister for Health. The adult mental health unit was opened when Katy Gallagher was the Minister for Health.
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