Page 141 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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MR HANSON: Certainly, Madam Deputy Speaker; I do appreciate that. I will move on to the next point, which is a reflection of where we were in 2001-02 with elective surgery rates. We had a waiting time, a median wait, of 40 days. I have said before that it is now 72 days. That is a significant decline. Regardless of the excuses that Mr Stanhope, his colleagues and the Greens make for this, it is inexcusable.
Patients have waited for more than 365 days. You will recall that Mr Stanhope said that he was addressing those people who had been waiting the longest because that is how he is tackling it and that is why the figures are so bad. But when you look at the facts, and not the spin, you will see that we have the worst result for people who wait the longest. Indeed, for people who have waited over 365 days, that figure is 10.3 per cent of all patients, whereas the national average is three per cent. For Mr Stanhope to say that he is tackling the patients waiting for the longest period of time—that is clearly not having any effect on the numbers.
I will move on from elective surgery to our emergency department waiting times. At some time most of us here would have experienced the result of our long waiting times for emergency department treatment or heard from constituents who have waited for hours and hours with their children or elderly patients who have been unable to see medical staff on time for urgent and semi-urgent treatment. For urgent and semi-urgent treatment, the categories are 30 minutes and 60 minutes respectively. You are meant to see 75 per cent of those patients on time. However, in the ACT it is 52 per cent and 51 per cent, respectively, for urgent and semi-urgent. That is only just behind the Northern Territory, the worst in the nation. When you consider the issues that the Northern Territory faces in terms of health outcomes, with its difficult problems with socioeconomic status and a large Indigenous population, you see that that is another dismal failure by the Stanhope Labor government.
Mr Stanhope has talked about hospital beds and the number of hospital beds that his government has put in. The reality of the situation is that the ACT Labor government has delivered the lowest number of hospital beds per capita in Australia. Compared to all the other states, per capita we have the lowest number of hospital beds. It is a dismal record.
With general practitioners we know that this government has essentially denied responsibility for any failure to provide the number of GPs we need in the ACT—to a point where we are now short 70 positions. Whilst GP numbers in the rest of Australia have been growing at eight per cent per annum, we have got a decline in our GP numbers so that again, per capita, we have the lowest number of GPs in Australia. And of the GPs that we do have, we now have the lowest bulk-billing rate. We have the lowest number of public dentists.
This is not coming cheap. We spend more per capita than any jurisdiction in Australia other than the Northern Territory, but we have health costs which are increasing at 11.1 per cent, the highest in the nation. Not only are we spending more than anybody else: we are getting the worst results, and health costs are increasing at an exponential rate, more than in any other jurisdiction in Australia.
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