Page 2564 - Week 08 - Thursday, 14 August 2014
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seeing more patients, more patients are going to need imaging—more outpatients particularly if we are delivering more elective surgery. And this goes to dealing with that demand.
In the capital area there is the construction of the car park at Calvary Public Hospital with works underway already, as I understand, on that project. There is work on the refurbishment of beds at Calvary Public Hospital, the secure mental health unit, essential infrastructure in engineering works at Canberra Hospital. There is the refurbishment at Canberra Hospital for the additional beds. Importantly, one of our key major projects, the University of Canberra public hospital, is also receiving funding in this budget.
In terms of some of the areas of pressure that Mr Hanson always likes to focus on, I will go to the latest quarterly performance report that I believe is online, because I think the figures Mr Hanson was quoting, from my understanding, were probably a bit dated. In the quarterly performance report which brings our statistics up to March 2014, all triage categories have recorded improved performance over the first nine months of 2013-14 when compared to the same period last year. National targets were met for triage categories 1, 2 and 5. This is now the third consecutive quarter where triage category 2 timeliness has achieved the desired target. Category 5 continues to exceed benchmarks with 86 per cent of the cohort seen on time. This is despite a 39 per cent increase in category 5 patients during the first nine months of 2013-14.
This is a significant improvement for the ACT emergency departments and shows that recent initiatives are starting to take effect. There is a table which shows the median waiting times for patients to be seen from when they present to an ACT public hospital emergency department to when treatment first commences.
I also note we have seen improvements in NEAT target. For the first three calendar months to March 2014 the ACT NEAT result was 63 per cent, a considerable improvement when compared to 58 per cent reported in March the previous year. So I completely reject Mr Hanson’s allegations that it is flatlining and not improving.
I also think there was a fairly selective search of the peer hospitals in the MyHospitals website if you actually measure it against admissions, patients actually seen in those emergency departments. I can give you some examples here: Frankston, Victoria, 58,000 patients, performance 48 per cent—I believe that is a Liberal government down there—Gosford, almost 58,000 patients, performance 45 per cent—I believe that is a Liberal government—Blacktown, performance 41 per cent; two in Flinders, performance 51 per cent, 70,000 patients.
The John Hunter Hospital is the hospital which I think is most like the Canberra Hospital in the whole country in terms of the role it provides as a regional hospital, a major tertiary referral hospital. John Hunter’s performance was 48 per cent against their peer performance of 60 per cent. They see 69,000 patients a year. Canberra Hospital, on those statistics—and it has improved, as I just read out, to over 60 per cent now—was tracking at 52 per cent and it sees 65,000 patients a year. So I think this line that emergency departments—
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