Mr HENDERSON - 2001-02-21
According to the 1999-2000 Territory Health Services Annual Report, there has been a significant increase in elective surgery waiting lists across all categories at RDH over the last three years. Can you explain how you are going to reduce these escalating waiting lists when the new facility, yet to be constructed, will have no additional theatre capacity, with five theatres to be built, exactly the same number which currently exist?
ANSWER
Mr Speaker, that is in fact a good question. The issue of elective surgery is sometimes misunderstood by the general public because it is a name which one insinuates means that your are choosing to have some kind of surgery done to you. In fact, a more appropriate name is probably deferrable surgery because often it is a medical opinion that this is surgery that can wait for a period. Sometimes that period is for patients to look at other things that they may choose, including going to other places and making those assessments about their options. Nonetheless, many people awaiting elective surgery need it to suppress pain or to improve the quality of their life so it is a very serious matter, the fact that people are waiting for this category of surgery called elective surgery.
One of the things that we would like to do with our redevelopment is something that Labor have a terrible blind spot about and that is to have greater capacity to use the private sector. Now, I know this is going to cause them immense pain because they cannot even bring the word private out of their mouths, but if you look at other places around Australia, including places where Labor governments are very proud of their health system, the private sector plays a great role and we would like to encourage that here in the Territory. We think there is great capacity for provision of private medicine, including elective surgery. So what we have done, which is pretty clever thinking when you think about it, is to make sure that the redevelopment that sits between the Darwin Private Hospital and the Royal Darwin Hospital has the capacity for both hospitals to use some very high cost facilities.
Some of these facilities are theatres, so what we are trying to do is make sure that theatre use is optimised by both hospitals. The opposition member says ah ha – you are stuck there because you have the same amount of theatres so you are going to find that those lists backup. That is, in fact, not the case because there is the capacity for greater use of theatres, particularly when you look at extended hours and after hours. There is also the capacity for private use of these theatres that reduce the burden on Territory taxpayers meaning that people who have taken the wise decision of taking up private health insurance to look after their own health interests instead of being entirely reliant on government health can choose to use private providers. We are hopeful that with arrangements we can put in place with the Darwin Private Hospital, and these are fairly well advanced, we will see more doctors and more specialists coming to the Northern Territory and hanging up their shingle as private providers and also doing work from the public lists. The function of having specialists only as public or only as private is fast disappearing and we are finding that if we have more specialists who are able to do the work and address those lists, particularly elective surgery lists, we are pretty sure we can make great inroads into those lists.
But it should be remembered that when you talk about Darwin you have to make sure that you benchmark appropriately. What the Labor Party does is say, look, there are people on lists and there are people waiting therefore it is a terrible government fault. What they should do is look to other jurisdictions and other places where you can adequately benchmark and you should look at how they address those problems and you should look at the resources they are able to deploy. This government is very, very proud of our health record.
Dr Toyne: God, pretty low standards then!
Mr DUNHAM:The interjection is sort of a plaintive, ‘God’, from the gentleman from Stuart, but I am very proud of our health system and I am quite happy to put that on the record.
I am happy also to defend those good workers there who are constantly attacked by those opposite and are defamed, I would say, to some extent by some of the innuendo and assertions made about the services that come out of Royal Darwin, and remember many of those services are human services. They are not just reliant on high tech machines, they are reliant on the skills that are being provided through the doctors, nurses and other practitioners in that building. So just remember that, when you attack our hospital system you are also attacking the people who work there, and when you parade your hospital launch …
Members interjecting
Mr DUNHAM I will read it because I am sorry I could not get there on Friday like everybody else. It shows just how interested people are in what Labor are going to do to our hospitals.
But we have a proud record of putting our hand in our pocket here. We spend more than any other jurisdiction in Australia on our health system. We have less private provision so less capacity to defer costs to the private sector. We have a population with high acuity levels, which is acknowledged, and we have strategies to make sure that there is a seamless transition in and out of the community sector and into the acute sector and our preventative programs to work on prevention rather than treatment are starting to bite. We now have the capacity to measure some of the things that we are trialing in the field to prevent people from actually going into the hospital. I have mentioned those in the parliament before and I know that the opposition may have missed them because they may well have been absent or asleep. But they can, by a mere perusal of Hansard, see some of those strategies that are in place, and I am quite happy to revisit them.
ANSWER
Mr Speaker, that is in fact a good question. The issue of elective surgery is sometimes misunderstood by the general public because it is a name which one insinuates means that your are choosing to have some kind of surgery done to you. In fact, a more appropriate name is probably deferrable surgery because often it is a medical opinion that this is surgery that can wait for a period. Sometimes that period is for patients to look at other things that they may choose, including going to other places and making those assessments about their options. Nonetheless, many people awaiting elective surgery need it to suppress pain or to improve the quality of their life so it is a very serious matter, the fact that people are waiting for this category of surgery called elective surgery.
One of the things that we would like to do with our redevelopment is something that Labor have a terrible blind spot about and that is to have greater capacity to use the private sector. Now, I know this is going to cause them immense pain because they cannot even bring the word private out of their mouths, but if you look at other places around Australia, including places where Labor governments are very proud of their health system, the private sector plays a great role and we would like to encourage that here in the Territory. We think there is great capacity for provision of private medicine, including elective surgery. So what we have done, which is pretty clever thinking when you think about it, is to make sure that the redevelopment that sits between the Darwin Private Hospital and the Royal Darwin Hospital has the capacity for both hospitals to use some very high cost facilities.
Some of these facilities are theatres, so what we are trying to do is make sure that theatre use is optimised by both hospitals. The opposition member says ah ha – you are stuck there because you have the same amount of theatres so you are going to find that those lists backup. That is, in fact, not the case because there is the capacity for greater use of theatres, particularly when you look at extended hours and after hours. There is also the capacity for private use of these theatres that reduce the burden on Territory taxpayers meaning that people who have taken the wise decision of taking up private health insurance to look after their own health interests instead of being entirely reliant on government health can choose to use private providers. We are hopeful that with arrangements we can put in place with the Darwin Private Hospital, and these are fairly well advanced, we will see more doctors and more specialists coming to the Northern Territory and hanging up their shingle as private providers and also doing work from the public lists. The function of having specialists only as public or only as private is fast disappearing and we are finding that if we have more specialists who are able to do the work and address those lists, particularly elective surgery lists, we are pretty sure we can make great inroads into those lists.
But it should be remembered that when you talk about Darwin you have to make sure that you benchmark appropriately. What the Labor Party does is say, look, there are people on lists and there are people waiting therefore it is a terrible government fault. What they should do is look to other jurisdictions and other places where you can adequately benchmark and you should look at how they address those problems and you should look at the resources they are able to deploy. This government is very, very proud of our health record.
Dr Toyne: God, pretty low standards then!
Mr DUNHAM:The interjection is sort of a plaintive, ‘God’, from the gentleman from Stuart, but I am very proud of our health system and I am quite happy to put that on the record.
I am happy also to defend those good workers there who are constantly attacked by those opposite and are defamed, I would say, to some extent by some of the innuendo and assertions made about the services that come out of Royal Darwin, and remember many of those services are human services. They are not just reliant on high tech machines, they are reliant on the skills that are being provided through the doctors, nurses and other practitioners in that building. So just remember that, when you attack our hospital system you are also attacking the people who work there, and when you parade your hospital launch …
Members interjecting
Mr DUNHAM I will read it because I am sorry I could not get there on Friday like everybody else. It shows just how interested people are in what Labor are going to do to our hospitals.
But we have a proud record of putting our hand in our pocket here. We spend more than any other jurisdiction in Australia on our health system. We have less private provision so less capacity to defer costs to the private sector. We have a population with high acuity levels, which is acknowledged, and we have strategies to make sure that there is a seamless transition in and out of the community sector and into the acute sector and our preventative programs to work on prevention rather than treatment are starting to bite. We now have the capacity to measure some of the things that we are trialing in the field to prevent people from actually going into the hospital. I have mentioned those in the parliament before and I know that the opposition may have missed them because they may well have been absent or asleep. But they can, by a mere perusal of Hansard, see some of those strategies that are in place, and I am quite happy to revisit them.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016