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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-10-17 Daily Xml
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ELECTIVE SURGERY

Mr BIGNELL (Mawson) (14:47): My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Can the minister update the house on new national elective surgery statistics released yesterday?

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (14:48): I am very pleased to advise the house that the latest statistics which were released yesterday show that South Australia topped the nation when it comes to treating people for elective surgery in relation to the number of people who had to wait longer than 12 months. We were ranked No. 1 in Australia, with only 1.5 per cent of our patients waiting longer than 365 days for surgery. That is about half the national average, which was 2.7 per cent.

We were ranked No. 3 in Australia for having a median wait time for elective surgery of 34 days. That compares more than favourably with 38 days the previous year and is better than the national average by two days; so 50 per cent of our patients are seen and have their elective surgery within 34 days, which I think everybody would agree is a pretty good outcome.

The 90th percentile wait, or the time at which 90 per cent of people have their surgery, was 191 days in our state, and that is 60 days better than the national average. So 90 per cent of patients in South Australia who need elective surgery received that within 191 days. Madam Speaker, 65,199 elective surgical operations were performed in our hospitals in 2011-12. That is 2,695 more procedures, or 4.3 per cent more, than in the previous year. In our metro hospitals, we performed over 9,600 more procedures in 2011-12 than in 2001-02, which was the year that we came to government.

The national report released yesterday shows that South Australia has the highest rate of elective surgery admissions per 1,000 people in the nation; that means fewer people have to wait and more people are getting the work done. There was just one patient, in fact, overdue for surgery at the end of June 2012—just one person who was overdue for surgery as of that date. That's in stark contrast to 2003-04, which was soon after we came to government, when 2,551 patients were overdue for elective surgery. So, there has been a huge turnaround, a vast improvement, in the elective surgical procedures in our state.

At the last election, we committed $88.6 million over four years to give more South Australians quicker access to elective surgery. That was part of our Every Patient Every Service strategy, and that is working very well. These results are outstanding and demonstrate once again the commitment of surgeons, nurses and all the others who work in our hospitals to meeting those targets. They have had to change in some ways the way they worked, some overtime has been done, work on weekends and so on.

The results follow another AIHW report, released on 28 September, which showed that we topped the nation in three of the four indicators for emergency department care. In 2011-12, South Australia had the shortest median wait in the nation to see a doctor or nurse in the emergency department, the equal highest proportion of patients who are seen in time and the shortest 90th percentile waiting time.

I am very proud of the performance of the health department and I can assure all members of the house that we will continue to work to improve further the outstanding performance we have reached so far.

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