Page 2177 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MS GALLAGHER: Mr Speaker, I cannot actually hear. I have listened to every single speaker tonight.
Mrs Dunne: No. You were not listening when I was speaking.
MS GALLAGHER: Yes, I was listening to you, Mrs Dunne.
MR SPEAKER: Order!
MS GALLAGHER: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I welcome positive comments by Mrs Dunne, Mr Seselja, Dr Foskey and Mr Mulcahy around elements of the healthcare system. It is nice to see that recognition. It does not come very often, but it was here tonight. I am very pleased that there is recognition of some of those areas where the health system is working, and working hard, to improve on areas of performance.
No health system in the world would be able to say that there is no pressure or that there are no areas where they would like to see continued improvement, and the ACT is no different. But I was heartened by the recent Australian hospital statistics released on 30 May. That report, whilst, of course, identifying areas for continued improvement, has really shown quite significant improvements in a number of areas. It shows that our hospitals are busier than ever before, with six per cent growth in activity. It shows that the rate of utilisation of the ACT public hospital system is 11 per cent higher than the rest of the nation—again showing that the public have confidence in their public health system.
It shows that the relative stay index, which is a very important indicator of how a hospital system is performing, is better than the national average. There are improvements in emergency department waiting times. The treatment people receive once they are in the emergency department and then admitted to the hospital is very efficient. Our costs are coming down, even though our salary costs are increasing. At times when our doctors’ and nurses’ salaries are increasing, our overall costs are continuing to decline. That is something that we committed to improving two budgets ago, and it is pleasing to see that that work is still going.
The report shows that there is increased access to elective surgery. It also shows that 9.9 per cent of admissions have waited longer than one year for surgery against the national figure of 3.1. The project that Mr Corbell started, and which I continued, to ensure that people who were experiencing long waits got improved access to surgery, according to this data, is clearly showing an improvement.
In the elective surgery debate it is important to note that one of the issues that impacts significantly on our ability to continue to grow our throughput—I have looked very closely at this issue—is our heavy delivery of emergency surgery. On any given day of the week 50 per cent of the work done in our theatres is emergency work. We have seen big increases in the demand for emergency surgery over the past 12 months and what that means, effectively, is that five of our 10 theatres at Canberra hospital are quarantined for emergency use, and that does have an impact on the amount of elective surgery that can be done.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .