Victoria's hospitals have performed poorly on their report cards that judged them against statewide benchmarks for emergency care and elective surgery. In some areas, the performance has worsened.
These numbers for the first three months of this year show hospitals have failed to meet six out of ten performance targets for emergency care and elective surgery.
The Health Minister, David Davis, admits improvement is needed but blames Labor for neglecting the system. “We've inherited a situation and it will take some time to turn around the liner, as it were,” he said.
Emergency departments missed targets for treating urgent patients within 30 minutes but exceeded benchmarks for treating more serious cases within 10 minutes. This means more than 30,000 patients waited longer than they should have under the health department's own benchmarks. More than 50,000 patients categorized as semi-urgent waited more than an hour for treatment, while 380 people languished in emergency departments for longer than a day.
The figures in the Victorian Health Services Performance Report also found only 85 per cent of patients were transferred from ambulances to emergency departments within the required 40-minute timeframe. As at March 2011, there were more than 40,000 patients on the elective surgery waiting list, 2000 more than the last quarter. On the other hand there were some areas of improvement including hospitals spending less time on ambulance bypass. Average waiting time for dental care improved marginally, dropping from 18 months to 17.
These figures on hospital performance will now be available online and patients can get real-time information on how long they can expect to wait in emergency departments.
The Opposition health spokesman Gavin Jennings said, “It would be a tragedy for Victorian patients if the health minister's major achievement in 2011 is the website and not new beds, not new doctors, not new nurses.”
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