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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2008-03-06 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

ELECTIVE SURGERY

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:10): The Department of Health proudly boasts on its elective surgery website that it has a four-year elective surgery plan. This is a plan that was developed by the department and commenced in July 2004. The plan aims, it says, to 'improve access to surgery across SA public hospitals'. The website reveals, 'The objective of the four-year elective surgery plan is to meet national waiting time targets by June 2008.' It is quite clear from the published material to date that the government has no hope of achieving this within the 120 days to go, and clearly does not want anyone to know about it. For two years I have sought that the government should provide timely and full disclosure on elective surgery processes in this state but it still refuses to reveal:

1. a promised monthly website report (which is sometimes up to three months late: this year in January the release for October 2007 was posted);

2. details on how many are on the elective surgery lists (and this is a much reduced version of what was previously provided under the previous administration);

3. a monthly report on how they are progressing against the promises made in the four-year plan.

The national waiting target times that already apply across the nation provide that persons in the urgent category should be seen within one month as a maximum waiting time for surgery, semi-urgent patients should be seen within three months and non-urgent patients within 12 months.

Instead of giving the information as per their progress relative to their own plan, they trot out information on the percentage of the admitted patients that have received their surgery within the appropriate time frame. None of them, I might add, as much as it might be interesting information to look at, actually confirms that they have reached the target and, also, they confirm a woeful performance. Let us look at January 2008. That tells us that 71.3 per cent of the admissions are in the nominated period for urgent category, 69.7 per cent for the semi-urgent category, and 91 per cent for the non-urgent category. None of those complies with the national standards, and have no hope of improving if one looks at the previous three years since the 2004 plan was established.

It might be interesting information, but it fails to disclose how the government is travelling against the plan. I quote a constituent who has read this information, as follows:

The percentage of patients admitted within the clinically recommended time remains at least 10 per cent short of the government target in every admission category. The data trend does not suggest that the government targets will be met at any time soon, and certainly not by June 2008.

That is what he has reported. But he has not only reported that, but also he has actually written to Dr Tony Sherbon at the Department of Health explaining that the information on the website is not only misleading but also fails to allocate the information. That letter has been ignored, so he has written to them again to say, 'I have now looked at the January website and you still have misleading information on the website and, secondly, you still fail to address the substantive issue, and that is to advise the populace how you are travelling against the target consistent with the plan that is all due to be fixed up in 120 days' time', and still it has been ignored.

The government does not want anyone in the public to know the situation. What they do is trot out an announcement by the federal government that they are going to get more funding which they say is going to resolve this problem by 30 June 2008. Of course, Dr Peter Ford from the AMA tells us there are not enough nurses and doctors to do it, anyway. We are not critical of the federal government for coming to assist South Australia—we are due to get about $13 million to help with this. We say it is unconscionable for the government to continue to say, 'We are an open and accountable government. We are transparent on this issue; we have a plan; it is an important and effective plan', yet they will not provide and release the data to be able to make that assessment.

Even with an elective surgery steering committee, which they have set up—and, again, which they publicise on their website—to oversee the implementation of the four-year plan and, as they say, to provide 'high level advice', they are still failing. They are still failing miserably, with no capacity to be able to confirm to the public that they are going to achieve this plan and justify all the money that is being spent.

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