Rebecca White demonstrates her failure to understand health performance measures

Rebecca White’s latest media release shows her clear failure to understand basic health system performance measures.

The Health System Dashboard released today clearly shows that the median wait time of patients that were treated within 2014-15 increased from 47 to 76 days. This is a good thing – it demonstrates that we successfully treated the long waiting patients that Labor left languishing on the waiting list for years on end. This was a deliberate purchasing decision which has been clearly articulated in Parliament over two budget cycles. The measurement is not a general performance measure – it shows the median wait time based only on those patients who actually got their operation!

This is consistent with the Tasmanian Government’s policy of ensuring that the longest waiting patients are now treated. Many patients had waited so long for surgery that, once treated, their waiting times were large enough to skew the median wait time upwards. Clearing the longest waiting backlog can only be achieved by accepting a temporary increase in median wait times of the people we treat.

It is totally wrong for Ms White to say that “… people are now waiting nearly twice as long for their surgery compared to the same time the year prior.” In fact, the truth is quite the opposite, with the number of days waited beyond the clinically recommended time for their surgery lower for all categories at the end of 2014-15 than at the commencement.

The most staggering decrease was a drop of 214 days in the average wait time for category three patients, from 460 days over-boundary to 246 days over-boundary.

Ms White should correct her embarrassingly inaccurate media statement and acknowledge that, whilst there is still work to be done, the Hodgman Liberal Government provided more elective surgery in 2014-15 than last financial year, the waiting list is now shorter, elective surgery cancellations are down compared to 2013-14, and the waiting time for people remaining on the waiting list has been significantly reduced.
Michael Ferguson, Minister for Health