Labor wrong again on health

In the past year we have increased our workforce by 35 nurses across the THOs, and no doctors have been given redundancies. In contrast, Labor cut 290 nurses when in Government.

It’s therefore absolute rubbish for Labor to continue to scaremonger about savings measures.

With our additional elective surgery funding we have targeted complex and long-wait cases, which has seen all children who had waited over the recommended time (as at 1 July) receiving treatment, as well as targeting all urgent over-boundary adults.

While there is much more work to do to fix the broken system and reduce waiting lists, over the past year the average waiting time for Category 3 patients has fallen from 531 days to 325 days, as a result of targeting these cases which are often more complex.

It’s a well-established fact that Tasmania has a broken health system where the amount of emergency surgery undertaken directly impacts on the amount of theatre time and staff available to undertake elective surgeries.

There has been a 4.5% per year increase in the number of emergency surgeries and an 8.7% per year increase in the hours of emergency surgery time. In the current broken health system, this creates a capacity issue for elective surgery.

We are fixing this and other failures of the system through the One Health System reforms. We are establishing a dedicated elective surgery centre at the Mersey to avoid the common issue of elective surgeries being cancelled because of emergency surgeries taking priority.

In the first year of our $76 million, four year funding commitment for additional elective surgeries, more than 940 additional surgeries over and above the baseline have been carried out.

The leftover money remains in the system to deliver additional surgeries in the coming year, and with the Government progressing reforms to separate emergency and elective surgery resources, we will see more Tasmanians getting the elective surgery that they need.
Michael Ferguson, Minister for Health