The New South Wales Government is being accused of failing to successfully stand up to the Commonwealth over funding after the Australian Medical Association released its latest report card.
Labor’s health spokesman Walt Secord says the State Government should be doing more.
“People wait longer in our emergency departments, wait longer for an ambulance and wait longer for elective surgery,” he said.
NSW joined every other state and territory bar the NT in failing to display an improvement in emergency waiting times in 2014.
NSW also failed to show an improvement in the time patients were required to wait for elective surgery in 2014, where Victoria, Queensland, the ACT and NT did manage to show an improvement.
Mr Secord said the NSW Government should share the blame.
“They talk the talk but when push comes to shove, when they go down to Canberra, they roll over and accept what the Liberals and Nationals present to them,” he said.
“Mike Baird and Jillian Skinner have not stood up to the Liberals and Nationals, their counterparts at a federal level, and this is the human cost of their failure to stand up.”
On the flip side of the coin, NSW was the only state to meet the national elective surgery target for category two submissions in 2014.
Of the six categories used to measure states, NSW met its target to for two of them. Only Victoria and Queensland were able to meet targets in three categories.
In the wake of the report, AMA president Brian Owler has warned of what is to come.
“The states are facing a hospital funding black hole from next year, when the growth in federal funding slows,” he said.
He also said income taxes should not be cut in the current funding environment.
“That sort of slowdown in funding growth will mean that they will be under further strain, and I think we’ll start to see further clinical services being cut.”
Mr Secord took aim at the Federal Government.
“The AMA is telling us what patients are telling us, that the health system is under enormous pressure and things have gotten worse not better under the Liberals and Nationals,” he said.
“[They’re] coming up to their fifth year in government in NSW and they’re yet to stand up to Tony Abbott or Malcolm Turnbull’s cuts to the health system.”