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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2007-11-15 Daily Xml
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HOSPITAL WAITING LISTS

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:50): My question is again to the Minister for Health. What is to happen to the 900 people on the waiting list for outpatient appointments for plastic or reconstructive surgery at the Royal Adelaide Hospital? On 31 October 2007, a letter was forwarded to the Central Northern Adelaide Health Service, advising that the Department of Health had issued new guidelines on excluded elective surgery procedures. Patients waiting on outpatient appointments as at 5 November 2007 are to be advised that they will have to go back to their general practitioner with the advice that the procedure is no longer available.

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health, Minister for the Southern Suburbs, Minister Assisting the Premier in the Arts) (14:50): As members will know, our hospitals principally do two things: they deal with elective surgery and they deal with emergency situations. Both, as everyone in this place (and everyone in South Australia) would know, are growing in volume because our population is ageing and because the level of complexity associated with the illnesses of people who are getting older is much more complex. That is, essentially, what is happening in our hospital system.

Our job as a government is to try to make the available dollars go as far as we possibly can. We do that by ensuring that the clinicians who work in our hospitals have good support to make proper decisions based on clinical needs. Over the course of time that I have been health minister, I have been pleased to see an increase in the amount of money that we are investing in both sides of the equation: elective surgery and the emergency departments. For example, our target is 38,000 elective surgical procedures in our hospitals this year. That is an increase of some 3,000 or 4,000 over the time when the Liberal Party was in government.

We are also putting up on a website the waiting time for procedures hospital by hospital, procedure by procedure, right across the Adelaide area so that people can choose, through their doctors, which hospital they can go to so they can try to reduce the amount of time that they wait. In addition, I can say to the house that 96 per cent of elective surgical procedures in South Australia are provided within 12 months. That means that only 4 per cent of people wait longer than 12 months. We would like to see everyone receive their procedures within that period of time. That is why I am particularly pleased that the Labor Party at a national level has committed itself to an extensive program of funding of elective surgery, which will help us get through the procedures that have been waiting for some time. That will help enormously in South Australia.

The other thing that I announced a day or two ago, I think (which is what the member is referring to), is that, in future, the hospitals (and this is on advice from the clinicians) will not be conducting elective surgery that is non-medically based—in other words, a whole series of cosmetic surgical procedures, which in the past people may have expected hospitals to perform. We have to do this, because we have to make sure that the dollars we have and the services, the doctors, nurses and operating theatres, are reserved for those who have clinical need, and I do not think that anyone could rationally oppose that policy.

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