Tuesday, 7 February 2023

Rural and regional health

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (17:50): (15) My adjournment matter this evening is for the attention of the Minister for Health in the other place, and it concerns specialist appointments in outpatient clinics in the public system. As we know, we have got a very real crisis in our hospitals and our healthcare system. We have got tens of thousands of Victorians – actually we do not know, because the government will not provide that data. I have checked again, and there is still no data on the Victorian Agency for Health Information (VAHI) website about how many Victorians are waiting for their vital surgery. But even when they get that appointment to have that vital surgery, they have got to be seeing a specialist to enable that all to occur.

Back in 2018 the government promised 500,000 specialist appointments in rural and regional Victoria, and that was to occur over a five-year period. Well, we are coming up to that period, and what I want to understand are the details around that promise by the government. Yes, we have had COVID, but that is no excuse for not delivering on what is required in these areas, because far too many people, as we know, are impacted by a lack of services and a lack of being able to see a specialist to get ongoing management and care and, in many instances, surgery.

Just a few weeks ago it was reported that VAHI’s data was showing that the wait times for people to get an initial consultation with a specialist have blown out to more than a year. This includes for chronic diseases, and they are very debilitating – things like rheumatoid arthritis – and other appointments for neurologists or dermatologists for very debilitating conditions that affect people’s health and wellbeing. Some of these conditions affect their ability to even work, and when they cannot get in to see a specialist to get treated, to get managed or to have surgery, many people are not able to go to work. That just puts pressure on the entire system. Ending up on a disability pension at an early age is not the answer. We need to deal with a whole lot of these issues here and now, and I think the government has been remiss in not being up-front with the public about the extent in terms of where these specialist appointments are.

As I said, in 2018 the government promised an additional 500,000 of these specialist appointments in rural and regional Victoria. The action I seek is for the minister to provide to the house the number of specialist appointments that have actually been delivered out of those 500,000 promised. We need to understand the depth of the problem. If we do not understand this information, we cannot possibly then go towards fixing it. We all need to be working with that aim so that we can give Victorians, especially those patients that are waiting for these specialist appointments – waiting for treatment, waiting for management and waiting for their surgery – assurances that we understand what is going on.