Public hospitals - not much bang for the big bucks
AMA President, Dr Andrew Pesce, said today that the Government’s spending on public hospitals has delivered a very small return on a huge investment over four years, with the hospitals effectively being held in a holding pattern.
Dr Pesce said that the latest hospitals report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) shows that on all the basic measures there has been no real change in the capacity of our public hospitals to meet demand.
“There has not been much bang for the extra bucks spent on our hospitals,” Dr Pesce said.
“Doctors working in public hospitals all around the country today know there has been little marked improvement in the capacity of public hospitals to meet growing demand, and this has been confirmed by the AIHW report.
“The 378 new public hospital beds opened in 2009-10 is a big improvement on the 11 new beds opened in the previous year, but this is a long way short of providing the 85 per cent bed occupancy that allows for the safest and most efficient treatment. The number of beds per 1,000 population is still on a steady decline, so the capacity of public hospitals is not keeping pace with the population.
“There was no change in the proportion of patients seen in emergency departments within the recommended times for their triage category.
“Only 65 per cent of patients triaged in the urgent category were seen within the recommended time of 30 minutes, which is up slightly from 64 per cent in the previous year. The National Healthcare Agreement has set a performance benchmark for emergency department patients being seen within recommended times of 80 per cent by 2012-13, so there is a still a fair way to go to meet this benchmark.
“The elective surgery performance is not improving, with the median waiting time for elective surgery increasing by two days to 36 days.
“The Government’s investment in public hospitals is welcome but more needs to be done to ensure the funding is delivering better access to services and better patient outcomes.
“We need more beds to meet the needs of the population, including more mental health, transitional, and subacute care beds.
“We need robust long-term data collection and analysis systems so that we can have proper year-on-year monitoring and analysis of hospital capacity and performance.
“And we need transparency about the extent to which the private hospital sector is treating public patients, which is counted as public elective surgery,” Dr Pesce said.
29 April 2011
CONTACT: John Flannery 02 6270 5477 / 0419 494 761
Follow the AMA on Twitter: http://twitter.com/amapresident
