Mr HENDERSON - 2001-06-06
Waiting lists for elective surgery at Royal Darwin Hospital are increasing at an alarming rate, and I refer the minister to a table in the current annual report on page 109. More than half of all people classified as requiring urgent elective surgery are waiting longer than the recommended period of 30 days, up from around a third two years ago. For example that means that one in two patients needing biopsies for potential cancer diagnoses are waiting longer than 30 days. The RDH redevelopment, even when it is eventually completed, will not increase the number of operating theatres and the 2001-02 budget is already $15m below the likely real outcome for this financial year. Very sick people are waiting longer and longer for vital surgery. Why do the CLP ...
Mr PALMER: A point of order, Mr Speaker! Questions are meant to be just that - short and inquiring.
Mr SPEAKER: Yes, there is no point of order and there is some relevance to the comment on the other side that answers are very, very long and unnecessarily long. So please continue and get to the nub of the question very promptly. There is no point of order.
Mr HENDERSON: Very sick people are waiting longer and longer for vital surgery. Why do the CLP deserve another four years?
ANSWER
Mr Speaker, this is a little trick of putting a few statements together, none of which have a question mark after them, and then asking the question saying why do we deserve another four years. I can answer that latter part, the part with the question mark after it very, very quickly. But in doing so one could draw the assumption that I agree with the preceding statements. We now have a record from this particular member of gross inaccuracy. Gross inaccuracy bordering on - many of the things are now demonstrably untrue that he said. We can for instance go to Palmerston Health Precinct which these people did not think we were going to make. The Leader of the Opposition said there was a big fat zero attached to it, and there it is in the middle of today’s NT News for all to see.
So before he runs figures on waiting times which is the nub of it, and then he tries to paint it in such outrageous terms as people in urgent need of an elective procedure, so that I guess he is trying to say that they don’t die from cancer, I assume is what he is trying to infer, there are a few points to point out. First is that it is very difficult to measure waiting times but we now do that; we now do it across the nation. In the Northern Territory there are some specialties that do not exist and they exist in other places, and it is necessary for us to have visiting specialists come and treat Territorians, or alternatively put Territorians on planes and send them elsewhere.
The business about elective surgery is the assumption that this is surgery that can be deferred. I personally do not like the word ‘elective’ because most people do not elect to have these particular procedures done on them, but the phrase exists and essentially it means that the surgery can be deferred. The medical judgement is can it be deferred to the next visit of a specialist and we make that judgement. If it cannot, that person is put on a plane and they are sent to an interstate place where that procedure can take place, because then it isn’t elective surgery; it becomes urgent surgery and necessary surgery.
During today, while we are sitting, there are probably some 300 Territorians to be flown on planes through our PAT scheme. It is a scheme that over the course of a year flies something like 16 000 people between hospitals interstate, and it is for that reason that we are trying to build up our human resources in specialty areas. There are going to be some areas that it takes some time because there is a critical mass. It is going to be very difficult to get specialists, for instance, in cardiac and thoracic surgery up here, because these people not only need a lot of patients but they could quickly become de-skilled in the event that they are only treating a few patients as opposed to big practices in other places, but it is something the Territory is proud of. We have gone to great lengths to attract specialists to this place and we also don’t have a blind spot about the P word. Private - private hospitals and private medicine.
We think that that provides some great hope for us here because many specialists not only like the public work but they also like to do some work in the private hospital. That is why we have a memorandum of understanding so that we can have some synergies between those two hospitals. However, this particular blind spot with the opposition is something they are going to have to come to grips with because ...
Mr Henderson: It is in your annual report.
Mr DUNHAM: ... I know it is my annual report. Because if they don’t believe that the private sector has a part to play in medicine, particularly specialties, they should look to other places and see where much of this service is dispensed. I think we are doing a pretty good job with getting specialists here and if you go through that annual report you will see some of the ones we have introduced. We also do a good job with people who need elective surgery and those specialists here making the assessment and judgement as to whether they should fly to another place, or whether that particular procedure can be deferred.
If you want to talk about waiting times and you go through that, you will see that there are plenty of services we benchmark against - it is a pretty good annual report by the way - plenty of services we benchmark against other hospitals, and remember there are not many that adequately benchmark with Royal Darwin because of the unique circumstances. We are very proud of the services we dispense from that hospital and we are very proud of the works we are doing there in terms of the additional works that will be the new Royal Darwin Hospital. There is a substantial amount of work going on there that was also denigrated by the opposition. I suggest they go and have a look at that work. I suggest they get a few plans and have a look at what that will turn into. And instead of denigrating the good work done by Territory Health Services, the good work done by our medical people, the good work done out of Royal Darwin Hospital, that they focus a bit on the facts.
Mr PALMER: A point of order, Mr Speaker! Questions are meant to be just that - short and inquiring.
Mr SPEAKER: Yes, there is no point of order and there is some relevance to the comment on the other side that answers are very, very long and unnecessarily long. So please continue and get to the nub of the question very promptly. There is no point of order.
Mr HENDERSON: Very sick people are waiting longer and longer for vital surgery. Why do the CLP deserve another four years?
ANSWER
Mr Speaker, this is a little trick of putting a few statements together, none of which have a question mark after them, and then asking the question saying why do we deserve another four years. I can answer that latter part, the part with the question mark after it very, very quickly. But in doing so one could draw the assumption that I agree with the preceding statements. We now have a record from this particular member of gross inaccuracy. Gross inaccuracy bordering on - many of the things are now demonstrably untrue that he said. We can for instance go to Palmerston Health Precinct which these people did not think we were going to make. The Leader of the Opposition said there was a big fat zero attached to it, and there it is in the middle of today’s NT News for all to see.
So before he runs figures on waiting times which is the nub of it, and then he tries to paint it in such outrageous terms as people in urgent need of an elective procedure, so that I guess he is trying to say that they don’t die from cancer, I assume is what he is trying to infer, there are a few points to point out. First is that it is very difficult to measure waiting times but we now do that; we now do it across the nation. In the Northern Territory there are some specialties that do not exist and they exist in other places, and it is necessary for us to have visiting specialists come and treat Territorians, or alternatively put Territorians on planes and send them elsewhere.
The business about elective surgery is the assumption that this is surgery that can be deferred. I personally do not like the word ‘elective’ because most people do not elect to have these particular procedures done on them, but the phrase exists and essentially it means that the surgery can be deferred. The medical judgement is can it be deferred to the next visit of a specialist and we make that judgement. If it cannot, that person is put on a plane and they are sent to an interstate place where that procedure can take place, because then it isn’t elective surgery; it becomes urgent surgery and necessary surgery.
During today, while we are sitting, there are probably some 300 Territorians to be flown on planes through our PAT scheme. It is a scheme that over the course of a year flies something like 16 000 people between hospitals interstate, and it is for that reason that we are trying to build up our human resources in specialty areas. There are going to be some areas that it takes some time because there is a critical mass. It is going to be very difficult to get specialists, for instance, in cardiac and thoracic surgery up here, because these people not only need a lot of patients but they could quickly become de-skilled in the event that they are only treating a few patients as opposed to big practices in other places, but it is something the Territory is proud of. We have gone to great lengths to attract specialists to this place and we also don’t have a blind spot about the P word. Private - private hospitals and private medicine.
We think that that provides some great hope for us here because many specialists not only like the public work but they also like to do some work in the private hospital. That is why we have a memorandum of understanding so that we can have some synergies between those two hospitals. However, this particular blind spot with the opposition is something they are going to have to come to grips with because ...
Mr Henderson: It is in your annual report.
Mr DUNHAM: ... I know it is my annual report. Because if they don’t believe that the private sector has a part to play in medicine, particularly specialties, they should look to other places and see where much of this service is dispensed. I think we are doing a pretty good job with getting specialists here and if you go through that annual report you will see some of the ones we have introduced. We also do a good job with people who need elective surgery and those specialists here making the assessment and judgement as to whether they should fly to another place, or whether that particular procedure can be deferred.
If you want to talk about waiting times and you go through that, you will see that there are plenty of services we benchmark against - it is a pretty good annual report by the way - plenty of services we benchmark against other hospitals, and remember there are not many that adequately benchmark with Royal Darwin because of the unique circumstances. We are very proud of the services we dispense from that hospital and we are very proud of the works we are doing there in terms of the additional works that will be the new Royal Darwin Hospital. There is a substantial amount of work going on there that was also denigrated by the opposition. I suggest they go and have a look at that work. I suggest they get a few plans and have a look at what that will turn into. And instead of denigrating the good work done by Territory Health Services, the good work done by our medical people, the good work done out of Royal Darwin Hospital, that they focus a bit on the facts.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016