Thursday, 6 March 2025

South-Eastern Metropolitan Region

Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (12:45): (1443) My question is to the Minister for Health, and the question I ask is: Minister, why are there 2287 patients in Casey Hospital and 1744 patients in Dandenong Hospital still on waiting lists for planned surgeries across all categories – urgent, semi-urgent and non-urgent – as of December 2024? The government has recently praised the improved surgery wait times as contributing to the success of the ‘impressive results’. But this is just a smokescreen if there are so many patients on waiting lists in our hospitals. The reality is that people are waiting too long for the hospitals to meet their crucial benchmarks, and this is unfair to Victorians and my people in the South-Eastern Metropolitan Region. Labor’s broken health system continues to let the community down and Victorians are paying the price.