A blowout in waiting lists for elective surgery was always anticipated at the new Fiona Stanley Hospital, WA’s Health Minister Kim Hames says, as its phased opening continues.
Dr Hames confirmed the number of patients on the list had jumped by about 1,450 in the past year to 17,662.
The average waiting time for elective surgery had also increased by 2.3 months to 2.47 months since January 2013.
The Opposition’s spokesman for health, Roger Cook, said it was unacceptable.
“I expected a larger than usual increase in the elective surgery waitlist over this period, but I was surprised at the magnitude of the increase. Clearly something has gone wrong here,” he said.
“What we actually need is a Health Minister that is focussed on the job and can actually make sure that we keep a lid on the wait list cues and we’re getting those people through the system much faster.
“Minister Kim Hames is the one who claimed that Fiona Stanley Hospital was open and fully operational. These elective surgery waitlists show that’s clearly not the case.”
Dr Hames said longer waiting times were always expected.
“Labor are jumping up and down about this and to be honest, they must be asleep at the wheel if they didn’t know this was coming,” he said.
“It’s something that was inevitable as we shut down some hospitals, or reduce their capacity and crank up a brand new hospital with Fiona Stanley.
“It was always known that this would happen, in fact, it has been a steady trend for quite some months now.
“It’s not a problem because we were the second best in Australia in terms of how fast we get people through the system.”
National rankings slide will change: Hames
Dr Hames said WA has probably slipped a little in rankings but that would change.
“As soon as we’ve got all of those changes, Fiona Stanley at full capacity, we’ve got Fremantle that doesn’t have the pressures of the emergency department when they need to cancel operations because of emergencies coming through, that will give us much better capacity to come back and handle it and get those numbers down to where they should be,” he said.
He expects waiting times to recede in the next six to 12 months, once the new hospital is fully operational.
“I said to my staff, look just do the best that you can then we’ll fix this once we’ve got the hospital fully open,” Dr Hames said.
“We’ve done a lot of operations, we’ve still kept up there with most of the procedures, but you can’t just do it at the rate we were doing before.”
Mr Cook said the people on the list requiring surgery may be less understanding.
“It means that people who are waiting for pain relieving hip surgery or knee operations, or a range of other pain relieving procedures, will have to wait longer, and that can’t be good for the health of Western Australians,” he said.
He said the closure of Kaleeya Hospital was compounding the issue.
“We’re actually losing these little centres of high volume operations in these small hospitals around the place and as a result of that I think we’re actually seeing the intrusion of emergency operations starting to impact on our ability to get through elective surgery waitlists,” he said.