Tuesday, 21 February 2023

 Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (13:02): Despite what the government says, we do know that Victoria’s health system remains in crisis, and disgracefully, the government refused to release the Victorian Agency for Health Information data when they should have. That was the data between –

David Davis: A cover-up.

Georgie CROZIER: An absolute cover-up, Mr Davis. It was the last quarter – October, November and December – data that was released just a few days ago. In fact when they did finally release it just 15 minutes before the minister was to stand up and spruik what she was going to spruik, it was very clear when we analysed that that the ambulance code 0 wait times had increased but there were fewer call-outs. In fact for the most serious and life-threatening cases those code 0 incidents had increased to more than 9½ minutes over that quarter. Every second counts. And when you are waiting minutes and minutes for a call-out and these ongoing failures, which are simply unacceptable, continue to occur, you know that something is wrong. And of course we had reports of the Children’s Hospital just a few days ago, again from the data, that showed incredibly that 890 children were added to the surgery waitlist in the last year, and the delays are getting longer and longer. This is completely unacceptable.