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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2331 ..
MR SMYTH
(continuing):hospital. We do not have in any of the documents provided for this year's budget an indication of how the Health Minister is going to cope with that.
The other sad thing, and Mr Corbell has written to me about this, is that the document that he finally released as his new accountability measure for hospital waiting lists is, in fact, a far cry from what we used to release in terms of detail. I think that the minister should go back to the old format. At least it provided a consistent monthly indication of where the waiting lists were at so that people could work out where they were on the list and what was the likely opportunity for them to receive the treatment that they wanted.
The future financial performance of the health portfolio is something that the Assembly will need to take sharp note of, simply because without it we will have an absolute looming black hole in the budget. But, worse than that, we will have an enormous impact on those Canberrans who need and desire services and deserve those services when they want them. Perhaps we need to have a fundamental rethink.
It would appear that the changes that the then health minister, Mr Stanhope, was attempting to achieve when he said that he would get rid of purchase/provider and dragged the hospital back into the department have failed. I think you could make a clear link that those have failed. We have seen huge increases in the health budget and we have seen a reduction in real terms in the number of services across-the-board provided to Canberrans.
We are spending more on health and we are getting fewer outcomes in health. It is not sustainable to spend more and get less. You have only to look at the chart released that shows the growth in waiting lists. Something like 230 Canberrans were added to the waiting lists for the month of April, an enormous increase.
The minister will, no doubt, get up and bleat about the waiting lists not being an appropriate measure. They are one measure that is used. The other measure that should be used is the mean waiting time. All the mean waiting times in categories 1, 2 and 3 are going up, and they have been going up quite steadily and constantly since Labor came to office. I am sure that the Chief Minister ditched the health portfolio and gave it to Mr Corbell because his solution did not work.
We had the extra injection of cash, we had the abandoning of purchaser/provider and we had the hospital drawn back inside the department. What has been the outcome? We have spent more money and we have had less in the way of service. We have had radically less in the way of service in category 1, where there has been almost a doubling of the mean waiting time. Category 1 patients are the ones who require surgery within 30 days and we are now seeing category 1 patients slipping outside the 30 days. That is a direct consequence of Labor's health-
Mr Corbell
: The mean waiting time is not outside 30 days.MR SMYTH
: We are seeing category 1 patients slipping outside the 30 days. We are also seeing category 2, semi-urgent, and category 3 growing. The waiting times are growing, and they are growing under Mr Corbell.
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