Page 1527 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 8 May 2018
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emergency departments in Australia. It is a major tertiary centre for the ACT and surrounding New South Wales region, which means we treat many urgent and complex cases.
The ACT government has made investments in the ED in recent times but, as demand continues to grow at unprecedented rates and patients present with higher acuities or, in other words, more patients are more unwell, this is not having the performance effect we might have expected. There is more work to be done to improve flows within the emergency department at Canberra Hospital and flows and procedures throughout the wider hospital. This work is underway and is part of a good process of continuous improvement. In part this is due not only to increased presentations but, as I mentioned, to increased acuity.
Work is also underway in the emergency department to ensure that we meet our targets for seeing the most urgent cases, which Canberra Hospital does meet. It is also true that we have made some of the highest gains in the country on our emergency department figures. For example, we have improved from 51 per cent of patients seen on time in 2012-13 to 62 per cent of patients being seen on time in 2016-17. The performance of both ACT hospitals is comparable to peer group hospitals in other jurisdictions.
The emergency department care report from the AIHW for 2016-17 found that 71 per cent of ED presentations at Canberra Hospital had a length of stay of less than four hours compared with 68 per cent nationally within the principal referral and women’s and children’s hospital peer group. At Calvary 76 per cent of presentations had a stay of four hours or less against a national rate of 70 per cent within the public hospital acute system.
For elective surgery ACT Health is committed to minimising the number of people waiting beyond clinically recommended time frames for surgeries. There have been improvements, and the ACT is heading in the right direction when it comes to elective surgery waiting lists. But again, we need to continue to improve this performance. That is why early this year, in the 2017-18 budget review, $6.4 million was allocated to ensure more patients receive their elective surgery this financial year. This work is well underway and we expect a better result at the end of the current financial year.
We need to ensure that more surgeries can be delivered at public cost in both the public and private systems by increasing the allocation of operating sessions to those specialties with high demand such as paediatric and general surgery, orthopaedic surgery, urology and gynaecology.
When it comes to going on a waiting list to see a specialist, I think it is important to acknowledge that not all people on a waitlist will require surgery because surgery is simply not the solution in all cases. Non-surgical treatment may include medication, physical therapy and a range of other options provided by a multidisciplinary health team.
More and better data will soon start to be provided to ACT Health staff and clinicians as well as to the broader ACT community as a result of the ACT Health system-wide
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