Queues for elective surgery in the ACT are shortening but Canberrans still wait longer than most Australians.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s latest data shows the median ACT patient waited almost seven weeks (48 days) for an operation in 2013-14.
The result is a dramatic improvement from thee years earlier, when the waiting time was 76 days, but still longer than the national median of 36 days.
The ACT was one of only three states or territories to cut elective surgery waiting times over the past year.
However, despite the recent improvement, most health finance specialists expect queues to lengthen in the years to come as the population becomes older and more reliant on hospital care.
Chief Minister Katy Gallagher, who has been health minister for the past eight years, said the reduction was the result of heavy government investment and collaboration with the private sector.
She praised the city’s surgeons and hospital administrators but warned Canberrans that governments could “never win” the battle to shorten waiting times in the long term.
“That’s my worry about shouting out from the rooftops about this news,” she said on Sunday.
“The demand [for operations] is just insatiable. Every time we increase the number of elective surgeries we perform, more people pop up on the list. The list grows as fast as you move patients on.”
Ms Gallagher said she would continue to try to improve the health system by using the ACT’s two main hospitals more efficiently.
“The next step is to sort through the different roles that Canberra and Calvary hospitals play, so we will increasingly have more elective surgeries at Calvary while Canberra will become our major trauma hospital.”
ACT hospital waiting times have for years been among Australia’s longest and are a perennial political battleground.
In 2012, a Canberra Hospital executive confessed to altering hundreds of emergency department records to make waiting times appear shorter. An auditor-general’s investigation later found it was likely that other staff were also involved in the fraud.
Liberal leader and health spokesman Jeremy Hanson said on Sunday that Canberra’s surgery waiting times remained worse than when Labor was elected in 2001, when the median wait was about 40 days.
“Under Labor’s wanton neglect, that blew out to 76 days and it still isn’t back to where it was,” Mr Hanson said.
“Only after enormous political pressure was applied, through us, the media and the auditor-general’s review, did the government pull it back slightly.
“If the health minister wants to pat herself on the back for going from disastrous to very bad, that would be very disingenuous.”
Canberrans in need of a septoplasty – surgery of the nasal cavaties to improve breathing – faced the longest wait last financial year: the median time was more than a year (380 days).
The second-longest wait was for patients who needed their tonsils removed was 342 days.