Tuesday, 16 August 2022

Health system

Ms CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (19:58): (2053) My adjournment matter this evening is for the attention of the Minister for Health, and it is in relation to the waitlist, which is an increasing concern for the tens of thousands of Victorians who are waiting for their vital surgery. Today we asked in the Parliament about the numbers of Victorians who had died waiting to get their surgery. The minister was not able to answer that question.

We know that those figures are recorded, but they are not reported. In fact there were more than 7700 Victorians who were removed from the elective surgery waitlist between the months of April and June, the last reporting quarter. Unfortunately the government refused to provide those figures in the last sitting week. They dropped those figures well after the reporting date. But from those over 7700 people there will be people who have tragically died waiting for their surgery. Some will have gone off the list because their surgery is no longer required. Others that I am speaking with are going interstate to get their surgery. Today I spoke with another woman—and I am hoping the minister will follow her case up, because I wrote to her in June. She is considering going to India to get her knee replacement. This is totally unacceptable in Victoria in 2022. Since March 2020 Victoria’s elective surgery waitlist has grown by 72.5 per cent, or over 36 600 people. That is compared to a mere 11.6 per cent in New South Wales. So the failures are stark and they are real here in Victoria, and it is years of mismanagement and underinvestment by the government.

One of the issues around the reporting on these figures is that not all hospitals are included—hospitals like Wangaratta, Mildura and Bairnsdale. These hospitals do significant amounts of surgery, but they are not included on the official waitlist. The action I seek is that the minister provide the true figures of just how many Victorians are waiting for elective surgery in places like Bairnsdale, Mildura, Wangaratta and other areas of Victoria that are not included in the official figures and for the government to provide that to the house as a matter of priority.