Australia's public hospitals are performing more elective operations than ever before but the ACT is still struggling to bring down long waits for elective surgery.
An Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report into Australia's hospitals to be issued today shows that in 2008-09 more than 500 extra elective operations were performed in Canberra Hospital and Calvary Public Hospital.
The hospitals admitted 10,104 elective surgery patients, up from 9577 in 2007-08.
The median waiting time for elective surgery in the ACT was the longest in Australia at 75 days, while Queensland had the lowest median waiting time at 27 days.
More than 10 per cent of ACT elective surgery patients were forced to wait more than a year to undergo a procedure. Only Tasmania performed worse, with 13 per cent of patients facing a wait of at least a year for an elective procedure.
A spokesman for acting Health Minister Simon Corbell said higher median waiting times for elective surgery reflected the Government's strategy of increasing surgery for long-wait patients. ''Median waiting times are calculated based on those people removed from the list; therefore, targeting long waits will result in higher median times,'' the spokesman said.
The ACT Government has provided funding for an additional 800 elective surgery operations for 2010-11 and a further 1300 over the following three years.
In Canberra's two hospital emergency departments all patients requiring resuscitation were seen immediately and 85 per cent of patients in the ''Emergency'' triage category were seen within the recommended waiting time of 10 minutes.
But longer waits for less-urgent and non-urgent patients meant only 60 per cent of patients waiting in emergency were seen on time.
Mr Corbell's spokesman said the Government had implemented a range of measures to reduce pressure on the emergency department, including opening a six-bed mental health assessment unit and Australia's first nurse-led walk-in centre to treat minor illnesses and injuries.
Nationally, the number of people waiting longer than a year for elective surgery dropped from 4.8per cent in 2004-05 to 2.9 per cent in 2008-09.
Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon said the report showed that hospitals had benefited from extra funding provided by the Rudd Government.
''The biggest improvement is in the amount of elective surgery performed, with 38,239 more surgical admissions in 2008-09 than in the last full year of the former government in 2006-07,'' Ms Roxon said. ''This surge in surgery, and focus on treating those who have waited the longest, will have directly benefited thousands of families and elderly Australians right around the country.''
The ACT had the lowest recorded rate of hospitalisations which could have potentially been prevented if timely and adequate non-hospital care had been provided.
The ACT had 23 potentially preventable hospitalisations per 1000 people compared to 30.6 per 1000 nationally.
Source: The Canberra Times
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