Page 3854 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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see that those opposite are very uncomfortable with this. This is the sort of stuff they do not want to hear about. They do not want to hear about how well ACT Health and the public health system are performing.
In the past year we have reached collective agreement with collective parts of our workforce—nurses, midwives, clerical, technical, professional, health services officers and visiting medical officers—without any days lost to industrial action. This is the first time that this has ever been achieved. ACT Health also received full accreditation from the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards. The ACT Health incident management project, known as Riskman, won the national award for organisational change management project of the year for 2007 at the Australian Institute of Project Management awards ceremony.
The average cost per cost weighted separation for ACT public hospital services has dropped to 115 per cent of the national average cost in the latest available data published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. This is down from 130 per cent of the national average cost in 2004-05. In just one year we have halved the variation between the ACT and national average costs for hospital episodes.
During 2006-07 our public hospitals responded to higher than anticipated demand for care. Inpatient episodes of care were up six per cent in cost weighted terms compared with the previous year and double the estimated growth in services. Outpatient services posted a four per cent increase in activity over the year. The biggest area of growth in terms of outpatient care was in cancer services where our radiation oncology service managed an 11 per cent growth in occasions of service during 2006-07.
As we have already talked about today, the level of access block at our public hospitals has fallen again during 2006-07. Access block measures the proportion of people who are admitted to a hospital from the emergency department who spend more than eight hours waiting for transfer to a hospital bed. In 2004-05 the level of access block across the two hospitals was 41 per cent. This dropped to 33 per cent in 2005-06 and to 28 per cent in 2006-07.
This improvement is a clear demonstration of the effectiveness of a range of government initiatives to reduce pressures in the emergency department. They include establishment of the medical assessment and planning unit, MAPU; an extra $1 million allocated for more staff; the establishment of new fast track systems; a new registrar review clinic; and more beds in the hospital.
In elective surgery in 2006-07, 9,326 patients received elective surgery and were removed from the waiting list. This was 206 more than in the previous year. During 2006-07, 93 per cent of all category 1 elective surgery patients were admitted for surgery within 30 days. The number of people waiting longer than one year for surgery has dropped by 21 per cent in 2006-07.
The demand for elective surgery continues to increase in the ACT, with additions to the waiting list jumping by eight per cent in 2006-07 to 11,458 from 10,602. To meet the demand for elective surgery the government has provided another $2.5 million in
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