Page 2160 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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in the ACT’s emergency departments increased for all but category 1, concerning immediate resuscitation required, according to the figures released last week by ACT Health for the third quarter of 2007-08. Of course, the government spin was that there had been an improvement in waiting times compared to the same time last year. In fact, in reality and in truth, all the trend lines are down from the preceding quarter for the percentage of patients seen within the required time. So much for record funding in health: pay more, get less.
It is disturbing to learn that only 55 per cent of patients rated as urgent and 54 per cent of those rated as semi-urgent were seen and treated within the stipulated times—30 minutes and 60 minutes respectively. Even category 2, the emergency cases, that need to be seen within 10 minutes, have gone down a couple of percentage points to 78 per cent seen within the required time. The number of category 5, or non-urgent cases, who should be seen in two hours, had also slipped, to 78 per cent.
Even on the government’s own figures, access block from the emergency department has deteriorated so that 28.2 per cent of patients were not admitted within eight hours of the commencement of treatment in emergency for the third quarter of 2006-07. The figure for those aged 75 and over was 35 per cent. So much for record funding in health: pay more, wait longer.
According to data collated by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the ACT has the lowest proportion of patients seen in emergency departments within the recommended time and the longest median waiting times. The ACT also has the lowest number of hospitals beds per capita and the longest median waiting times for elective surgery. So much for record funding in health: pay more, get less.
There is also a question regarding how the figures are calculated. For example, one patient, who I referred to earlier, and who I recently spoke with in relation to the opposition’s health feedback hotline which, for the public record, people can call on 62054874, said she waited 30 hours between attending at the emergency department on a Friday evening and her eventual surgery on the following Sunday at the Canberra Hospital. But she was informed by hospital staff this was in reality only 17 hours waiting because the wait is actually calculated from the time of diagnosis and not treatment. This was despite being given a GP referral. So even when people are waiting, they are really not, according to this health minister’s logic.
Last week, the Minister for Health admitted that, as alleged by the opposition last December, patients are being parked inappropriately in emergency department beds while waiting for admission to a ward. The inclusion of these patients in data for patients admitted to a ward bed for treatment is likely to be skewing the hospital performance figures to suggest improvements in emergency services throughput that only exist on paper. The minister stated on ABC radio on 16 June this year:
Often access block—and that impacts on people’s timely access to care—occurs when there are no beds in the hospital free to be admitted to. So people stay in the emergency department and they use emergency department beds inappropriately.
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