Page 4367 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 30 November 1994
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Hospital Waiting Lists
MRS GRASSBY: My question is to the Minister for Health, and I would like to hear the answer, Mrs Carnell. The Canberra Times today carried an article headed "Majority of waiting list not urgent". Is the information in this article correct?
MR CONNOLLY: I thank Mrs Grassby for the question. What an extraordinary day it has been! We have had over an hour of question time. The health quarterly report, which usually sends the Opposition into a feeding frenzy - there it is, with its yellow cover, and notice that it is sitting on Mrs Carnell's desk - has been out in the public domain, and there has not been a single question from the Opposition on health. What have they been focusing on today? It has been on stopping competition in retailing, stopping competition in petrol, scaring the kangaroos and sort of murking around on a grant application.
Mr Cornwell: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I do not believe that that was the question that Mrs Grassby asked the Minister, and I would ask you to direct him to answer the question that was asked of him.
Mrs Grassby: On a point of order, Madam Speaker: I would like to hear the answer. If the rabble on the other side would be quiet, I might be able to hear it.
MADAM SPEAKER: Mr Connolly, please return to the quarterly report.
MR CONNOLLY: So, after an hour, and with no interest by the Opposition, I am pleased to address the quarterly report. The quarterly report shows that the ACT Government - which is focusing on the hard issues of government, not on the sorts of trivia and flim-flam that obsess the Opposition - has been getting on with the job of turning Health around from its previous disastrous levels, when Mr Seventeen Million Dollars over here had his blow-out, to a situation where we significantly overachieved on the target last year. Mrs Carnell was predicting $10m blow-outs. We came in at $4.4m - not a cause for champagne, but a lot better - and the prediction for this year is that we will bring the health budget in on target. We will achieve our target levels of activity and we will achieve them within budget, and no amount of Mrs Carnell's squawking and carping and carrying on will alter that. If Mrs Carnell thought that she was on firm ground, she would have been up on every question in question time, as she has been in the past, going on about the health quarterly report.
This shows a solid record of achievement; of consolidating the finances of ACT Health; of achieving very satisfactory throughput levels; and, most importantly, stopping the increases in the waiting lists, plateauing them and, in fact, bringing them down slightly. Most importantly, for the first time, we can report to the people of Canberra the composition of the waiting lists, using nationally accepted standards for categorising people on the waiting lists. The standard, which was developed in the first instance by your Victorian Liberal colleagues, shows that only some 19 per cent of patients on our waiting lists fall into the urgent category, category 1 - in fact, only 2 per cent are in category 1 and 17 per cent are in category 2 - that 81 per cent are in the very non-urgent category, yet our throughput in the - - -
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