AMA finds planned surgery wait times longest on record
An annual report card on the nation's hospitals has found wait times for elective surgery are longer than ever. The Australian medical association has also found public hospital emergency departments remain strangled by bed block.
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00:00Well, it's an annual report, and it never seems to be good news, particularly since
00:05the pandemic, when these elective surgery wait times really blew out. Elective surgery
00:12wait times are now the longest on record. People are waiting almost twice as long as
00:15they did 20 years ago. The median wait time is now 49 days, which is up by 22 days on
00:242003. So that's a pretty dramatic figure that they've put out today. Of course, it's
00:30not all just about wait times. This is a bit of a snapshot of public hospitals generally.
00:35In relation to emergency departments, the news wasn't great either. There's different
00:39categories of emergency wait times. There's sort of emergency and urgent and semi-urgent,
00:44but 68% of patients, emergency patients, were seen on time, and 58% of urgent patients were
00:52seen on time. The proportion of people across all of the emergency categories, which were
00:57seen inside the sort of ideal time of four hours, was down a bit and only 56%. The other
01:04thing that this report card identified, I suppose, is the number of beds in relation
01:09to the population. And it found that hospital beds are just not keeping up with population
01:14growth, particularly when it comes to the ageing population. And the figure there was
01:18beds for people over 65. There was 14.3 beds per 1,000 people, which the AMA says is not
01:25a great figure. There is a new national health agreement, but it's not coming into effect
01:30until next year. And what the AMA wants is for the state, territory and federal government
01:34to get together and put funding in to address this problem now while we wait for that agreement
01:38to come into effect. And they're asking for something of the order of about $4 billion,
01:43so quite a lot of money. And they also make the point that we often refer to these as
01:50elective surgeries. The AMA calls them planned surgeries. They're not necessarily non-urgent
01:55surgeries. This includes cardiac surgery. It includes things like fractures that haven't
02:01been able to heal properly. And of course, those ubiquitous surgeries that are constantly
02:05tying up wait lists, which is hip replacements and knee surgeries. So these are all surgeries
02:10that do need to happen in a timely fashion.
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