Page 2565 - Week 08 - Thursday, 14 August 2014
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Mr Hanson: They have all improved.
MS GALLAGHER: They have all improved, and so has Canberra Hospital. If you had been listening, we are now tracking at 63 per cent which is above peer benchmark and is about an eight per cent improvement. I completely reject the line that Liberal parties can run emergency departments and Labor parties cannot.
Mr Hanson: The evidence is there.
MS GALLAGHER: I have just given you a few examples where the Liberal Party are running them, and they are not tracking so well. So I think the line that there is some political affiliation with the performance of your emergency department is just rubbish.
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Ms Gallagher, direct your comments to the chair.
MS GALLAGHER: Labor governments run good emergency departments. Liberal governments run good emergency departments. It is absolutely ridiculous. And Mr Hanson knows this. He has been in the shadow role for some time now—and long may he live in that role—but he knows that how emergency departments run has absolutely nothing to do with politicians. Politicians should ensure that hospitals are adequately resourced, that they get the support they need through the budget and that they are managed effectively. The rest of the work is up to them, the clinicians in those emergency departments.
Can I just say again how demoralising it continues to be to have Mr Hanson constantly talk about the below-par performance or substandard performance of the emergency department. We know from patient surveys and from readmissions to the hospital that we offer one of the best services in the country in terms of readmission rates, in terms of patient satisfaction. Yes, on occasions people wait too long for care, and those clinicians are absolutely focused on that.
But we also have to accept—and this is where the emergency department is now sitting, around 60 to 62 per cent of people being seen within the four-hour time, and that is a huge improvement and has taken a huge amount of work from individuals who work tirelessly in our emergency departments to deliver that—that at some point it will reach its peak. And this is what we are seeing in WA, where their performance is actually coming back because of the effort that they have put in.
But you do reach a peak where you cannot go any higher or where the cost of going higher outweighs the benefit of putting that in. And that is the discussion that health ministers are having now, Liberal health ministers and Labor health ministers, around this and the ultimate target of 90 per cent.
Canberra emergency departments will never be able to achieve what New South Wales emergency departments can because of the number of New South Wales hospitals and the number of their hospitals that are small hospitals that do not see many patients and certainly do not see serious conditions. And that is one of the issues when you compare ACT to New South Wales as a jurisdiction, or ACT to WA. But there is huge improvement.
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