Tuesday, 1 August 2023

Elective surgery

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (19:46): (328) My adjournment matter is for the attention of the Minister for Health, and it is in relation to the elective surgery waiting list. I have spoken about the Victorian Agency for Health Information data earlier today. I confess I have not had a chance to have a look at it, but when I last looked today there was no data on the latest elective surgery waitlists. We know that elective surgery waitlists remain way too high. They were high prior to COVID –

David Davis: Frightening.

Georgie CROZIER: frighteningly high – and have been putting the health of so many Victorians at risk. They are having worse health outcomes because of the waits, and there are a whole lot of flow-on effects because of those delays.

Before the election last year the minister promised to deliver 240,000 elective surgeries by 2024. That is 20,000 elective surgeries per month, and 2024 is just five months away. From the last figures, this is not going to be able to be met, and we saw in the budget papers that they were not meeting their own performance targets in these areas.

Also, at the opening of the Blackburn Public Surgical Centre on 28 October last year, the minister said:

This centre will be completely dedicated to planned surgery and together with the new Frankston Public Surgical Centre, they’ll be delivering close to 15,000 surgeries a year.

We know that was not happening in the first few months of the operation. They were well under what they were promising to deliver. When asked in the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee if the centres were operating at anywhere near capacity, the minister said those two facilities had delivered 2000 surgeries – as I said, nowhere near the requirement to get to 240,000 surgeries a year in five months time. Again, asked when they would be fully operational, the minister responded, ‘By the middle of next year’. These centres that opened in September and October last year – 2022 – are not expected to be fully operational until mid-2024.

My question to the minister is: will you be able to deliver on the commitment of delivering 240,000 elective surgeries per year by 2024, as promised to the Victorian public in the lead-up to Victoria’s election last year?