Tuesday, 30 July 2024

Health services

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (17:49): (997) My adjournment matter this evening is for the attention of the Minister for Health, and it is in relation to releasing the report on the priority primary care centres review. At the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee this was raised at that time in relation to the establishment of the PPCCs and what they were supposed to do. The PAEC report on the 2021–22 and 2022–23 performance outcomes actually went to the crux of this. It states:

… it remains unclear whether PPCCs are meeting their overall aims. While patients are being diverted from EDs, available data related to EDs that may be impacted by the operation of PPCCs for the four quarters September 2022 to September 2023 show mixed results.

And it goes on to say how they are underperforming the target.

A Victorian Auditor-General’s Office report that has been tabled today is a scathing report on the access to emergency health care in this state. It just shows the decline in health and how it is deteriorating – through no fault, I might say, of those that work within our health services. It is all around the government’s management. The VAGO report highlights the issues around the number of patients staying in the ED. They talk about 2013–14 and then go on to say that since 2017–18 there has been a gradual decline in the number of patients, and that means that those numbers of patients have increased. In 2013–14 there were just 518 patients who stayed in the ED longer than 24 hours per 100,000 population. But in 2022–23 that increased to a staggering 11,363 – a 2094 per cent increase. This is post COVID. The issue was happening prior to COVID. As I said, in 2017–18 it started to go off the cliff – and it has certainly gone off a cliff all right. But it also goes to this issue around the PPCCs and this review, because there is a recent briefing from the department that the evaluation of the PPCCs was very limited, that it did not go into them to the extent that it should have and that we really need to sort of see what that review was.

The action that I am asking is that that review be made available, because Victorians deserve to understand what is in the review, what is in that report, what the recommendations are and how on earth the government is going to fix it, because all we get is spin and cover-up and absolute rubbish from the government about how well they are doing. In actual fact the VAGO report today shows how bad it is, and we cannot even get the reviews that Victorians deserve to see.