The latest review of Australia’s public hospitals shows Queensland has met just one target, but the state’s Health Minister Lawrence Springborg says a lot of the issues have already been addressed.
The COAG Reform Council report looked at elective surgery and the performance by emergency departments in 2013.
It found Queensland had met just one target by reducing the number of patients in the top 10 per cent of those who had been waiting longest for elective surgery.
The report outlines a number of failures, including the time frame for treating semi-urgent and non-urgent patients and seeing those who present to emergency departments in four hours.
It found in Queensland, 93.7 per cent of urgent elective surgery patients were seen within the recommended timeframe, but that fell short of the target of 100 per cent.
But Mr Springborg says the COAG Reform Council report is at least six months old and this year’s statistics are better.
“Queensland has actually managed to address most of that now as it is,” he said.
“The numbers have vastly improved since the report gathered its data – this data is significantly old now.
“In actual fact, it’s improved dramatically in a lot of places around Queensland.”
Mr Springborg says the State Government has been methodically working through many of the issues and future reports will show vast improvements in Queensland.
“In a very deliberate way, [we’ve] been working through and addressing what have been some historic issues for patients in Queensland, and addressing them one-by-one,” he said.
“The issue of emergency department performance has been significantly improved – we’ve slashed the long wait surgical wait list now by more than 50 per cent.
“We now have the majority of our hospital and health services, about 16 across the state, where they have no long-wait surgical cases in urgent, semi-urgent or non-urgent.
“The likes of central Queensland, the likes of Mackay, the likes of Darling Downs and a whole range of others no longer have any surgical long waits at all in the area of urgent and semi-urgent surgery.”
COAG Reform Council report see https://www.coagreformcouncil.gov.au/sites/default/files/files/Healthcare%20in%20Australia%202012-13%20Five%20years%20of%20performance%20REVISED%20WA%20SNAPSHOT.pdf
Source: ABC