Page 2449 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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We proactively initiated the Hawke review into our public service to ensure that it is achieving the greatest possible focus, efficiency and coherence as it delivers government services and priorities. The commissioning of this review and the decision to act quickly on its recommendations are acts of leadership that those opposite have welcomed with open arms. For one very slim moment, I took this—forgive me, Madam Assistant Speaker—recognition of the fine leadership this government has shown as a sign that I might have underestimated the shallow nature of the opposition party in this place.
My experience as health minister has confirmed to me again and again my belief that leadership is not about unilateral decision making or responding for the short term. Leadership is about building partnership and consensus to achieve a lasting result.
We have turned a corner in health funding for this jurisdiction through such a process. Federal government funding support for our health system was sadly lacking under the previous Howard administration. While the ACT continued to invest heavily in additional elective surgery over the first six years of our government, we did not have the capacity to meet growing demands for public health care as the commonwealth continually reduced its share of the funding.
The new partnership between the commonwealth and ACT governments is an example of what you can achieve when your main aim is improving services to the community. This new partnership, led by the government, will improve health outcomes. In this financial year, we will provide more elective surgery operations than ever before. By the end of May 2011 we had already equalled the previous record year in terms of access to surgery, with 10,100 operations completed. On top of this, we will exceed our original target of 10,712 operations in this financial year, providing about 1,200 more operations this year than we did in the previous year.
We have managed this increase in access by increasing the capacity of our public hospitals and entering into agreements with private hospitals to provide additional surgery. Over the last two years we have built four new operating theatres in our public hospital system to meet the growing demand. We have also added 73 beds to the system over the same period, in part to manage the increased elective surgery activity in our hospitals. And I do not need to remind those opposite of the fact that we have had to replace the 114 beds that they withdrew from the public hospital system here in the ACT.
It is this additional capacity that has enabled us to provide record levels of access to surgery this year, and this is making a real difference for people waiting for surgery. The number of people waiting too long has fallen by almost 1,000, from the high of 2,500 people in January 2010 to 1,576 at the end of May. While this figure remains too high, the reduction in long waits by almost 1,000 people in less than 18 months demonstrates the effectiveness of the government’s strategy to increase access to elective surgery.
In May 2001 we also reported the lowest figure for the number of people waiting longer than one year since we began reporting against this performance indicator in
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