Victorian patients could soon be handballed between hospitals that perform more work on weekends as the state government tries to overcome huge waiting lists for care that can leave people languishing for years.
On Monday, Victorian Health Minister Jill Hennessy revealed the “hidden waiting list” to see a specialist doctor in a public hospital ranged from a week to more than a year depending on what sort of care a patient needs and the hospital they are referred to.
She said the median waiting times for a first-time appointment with a specialist, such as a surgeon or a cancer specialist, to see if a patient needs further treatment, exposed a “hidden crisis” in Victoria.
The data, which covers April to June this year, showed the median wait for an ear, nose and throat specialist at Bendigo Hospital was 469 days, meaning half the patients waited longer than that to be considered for further care. In contrast, the median wait for the same sort of specialist at Austin Hospital in Heidelberg was 31 days.
Similarly, patients waiting to see a neurosurgeon could face a median wait of 451 days at the Northern Hospital in Epping compared with 49 days at the Austin.
The waiting times reflect the bottle neck of patients trying to get on to the elective surgery waiting list, which included 40,734 people at the end of June, compared to 38,078 at the same time last year.
Once on that waiting list, about one in ten patients can expect to wait longer than clinically recommended times for surgery, particularly if their condition is not life threatening.
In response to the “Travis Review” audit of hospital capacity, which showed about 10 per cent of hospital beds are not being used, Ms Hennessy said the government wanted to explore innovative and “sustainable” ways of meeting demand for healthcare.
This could include models of care where hospitals become seven-day-a-week organisations and partnerships between neighbouring hospitals, so patients get their treatment sooner.
After accepting all of the recommendations of the Travis Review, Ms Hennessy said one hospital had trialled a seven-day model of care, which led to shorter hospital stays for patients, more timely treatment and less deaths.
“Something as simple as opening up a pharmacy and getting people access to the drugs they need and a discharge plan on a Saturday or Sunday meant they could be discharged (home) and other patients admitted,” she said.
This kind of innovation would be explored by a new organisation called “Better Care Victoria” and an innovation fund for it to assess new initiatives, scale up proven innovations and facilitate the sharing of ideas to increase hospital capacity across the state. However, Ms Hennessy did not announce any new funding for the innovation fund.
“We will be announcing it in next year’s budget,” she said, adding that the government would like to use existing resources to their full potential.
The government is also planning to release a 20-year plan for the state’s health system in 2017 and will launch a pilot for a new funding system next year. The trial, called “HealthLinks”, will encourage health services to pool funds around specific high risk patients, such as those experiencing chronic disease.
Doctors praised the government’s release of outpatient appointment waiting times, saying they better reflected the real waits people experienced for surgery, not the waits publicly reported for the past seven years. But President of the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association Tony Bartone said the government should also report the average waiting times.
“The median and the average are not the same. Fifty per cent of patients wait longer than the median,” Dr Bartone said.
Chief executive of the Victorian Healthcare Association Tom Symondson praised the minister’s response to the Travis Review but said he looked forward to seeing more funding for the innovation scheme.