Page 4331 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 27 November 2013
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The government has responded. The article continues:
Health director-general Peggy Brown rejected the suggestion that the queuing system had been altered to improve … statistics.
‘‘This isn’t just about meeting targets,’’ Dr Brown said.
She said that this was actually about overall trying to reduce the number of people on lists. Further, she put out a press release on 13 November, saying that the comments made by the doctors were “misleading and false”. It is pretty strong stuff to say that the doctors’ comments are misleading and false, essentially accusing the doctors of lying. I can quote from correspondence from Calvary Health Care, from a letter that was distributed by their director of medical services regarding national elective surgery targets. It says:
Calvary Health Care ACT has received an unequivocal directive—
an unequivocal directive—
from the Director-General of ACT Health Directorate requiring us to make urgent, radical changes to the current approach undertaken by Calvary in the management of category 2 patients accessing surgery to reflect the model implemented at the Canberra Hospital.
He goes on to explain what that is, in particular:
In the scheduling of category 2 elective surgery patients, priority will be given to scheduling “in time” category 2 patients between 45 and 90 days of their time on the wait list.
He goes on to say:
The ACT Health Directorate had indicated that funding will be put aside for the 2013-14 year to specifically reduce those patients on wait times over the elective surgery wait list targets.
Essentially, the situation here is that doctors are saying that they are being told to target patients who have not gone over the category period—in this case, for category 2, to 90 days. So if you come on to the list and you have not exceeded that 90-day mark, “Get that person operated on now,” so that it meets the performance measures that you have met a certain number of patients being operated on within the time frame for category 2. If you have got a patient that has exceeded category 2, so they are determined as a category 2 patient but they have already exceeded their 90 days, operating on that person does not make any difference to the data. It does not improve the lists. So let that person rot. Let that person languish on the list because they do not help to make the data look better.
The doctors have a problem with this. The doctors, quite rightly, ethically and morally believe that if someone has come on to a waiting list, if they are due for surgery, they
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