Wednesday,31 July 2024

Victorian Auditor-General’s Office

Access to Emergency Healthcare

This report looked at whether the Department of Health and responsible agencies addressed Victorians’ need for timely and equitable access to emergency health care. It found a range of things, including that for the period of 2013–14 to 2022–23 the health services did not meet their targets for patients to be transferred from ambulances to the emergency department within 40 minutes, for patients to be seen within clinically recommended times or for the length of stay in the emergency department. I am going to run out of time to go through some of these important things, but what I want to say is this: in the South-Eastern Metropolitan Region, which I represent, it can be readily seen at major hospitals – Dandenong, Frankston and Monash – that, if you go past them at any particular time, we still have issues with ambulance ramping. It is a crisis in our health system that the government has completely failed to address, despite knowing about it for many years. In fact even the ambulance people are feeling stretched in the things that they are actually being expected to do.

One of the areas that the report highlights which the government has not been prepared to act on is for the department to improve its public reporting on timely access to emergency health care by publishing long-term performance data for Victoria’s public health services and updating it regularly. I note that reviewing and updating its budget papers and service delivery measures to ensure they are consistent with health service targets and show trends over time is also something that the government is not prepared to do. Interestingly, it has only accepted this in principle. So it stands to reason, given that this government has consistently and deliberately covered up health data, with a view to keeping Victorians in the dark about what was going on in the health system, that it is of course an attempt to hide from the public what any Victorian who has any recent experience with the health system already knows – that it is in a complete shambles, that Victorians are at risk and that there are unreasonable demands being made on ambo workers and other healthcare professionals.

I have to note the dedication and incredible hard work of all our health workers, in particular the ambos, the nurses, the doctors and all the hospital staff, who work tirelessly to keep this broken system going. After 10 years of Labor governments, the health system is in crisis as a direct result of Labor’s incompetence and mismanagement under Premier Allan. In conclusion, I again thank the Auditor-General and his staff for their work and commend this report to all members and indeed all Victorians who are interested to see what is going on in our health system. I do note, as an aside on top of this, that we continue to have WorkSafe issues in the health sector, with health workers continuously finding their health and wellbeing at risk from unacceptable violence and abuse in the workplace. These are courageous workers, many of them committed to making sure that Victorians have the services that they need, and this government is letting them down and is not protecting them. It is not meeting performance targets, and it is not allowing the Victorian people to see why.