Reduce demand in hospitals, boost community health to ease poor ACT emergency department wait times: AMA

The Australian Medical Association's snapshot of public hospital performance said 34 per cent of of urgent emergency department patients were seen within the 30-minute benchmark, below the national average of 67 per cent of patients.

The number of patients seen in ACT emergency departments within four hours has declined since 2016-17, when more than 70 per cent of presentations were completed in the timeframe. Fewer than 60 per cent of admissions were completed within four hours in 2019-20.

The president of the Australian Medical Association ACT, Professor Walter Abhayaratna, said poor performance in ACT hospitals had been evident for a number of years, but the problem needed to be recognised in order to fix it.

"Funding, capacity and performance are only addressing the medium-term issues that give us some time to make other long-term changes. The best solution for hospitals, community health and budgets in the long term is to reduce demand by keeping people out of hospital. Chronic disease and ageing are really what we're up against," Professor Abhayaratna said.

Professor Abhayaratna said work to improve care integration, role delineation and co-ordination between public hospitals would help ease the strain.

The association's report, published on Friday, said the rate of per-person funding growth from the Commonwealth and state and territory governments was too small to cover increased hospital costs and greater demand for patient care.

ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith acknowledged hospitals in Canberra were under strain, but said there was significant work under way to improve patient flow and performance across the health sector.

"Absolutely, our hospitals are stretched. Absolutely that is the case. In fact, during the most recent lockdown, while we did see a reduction in presentations to the emergency department, it wasn't anything like the reduction that we saw last year. Our emergency department still continued to be quite busy during our lockdown," Ms Stephen-Smith said.

Ms Stephen-Smith said Canberra's low rate of general practitioners also put a burden on the hospital system, as it made it harder for people to get consistent care outside of the hospital environment.

"The more people we can keep well at home and out of hospital, the better off they will be and the better off our system will be," she said.

"We need the Commonwealth to help us do that, but we also need them to help us by stepping up to meet 50 per cent of the cost of hospital funding, just as the AMA and many other stakeholders are arguing for."

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The opposition's spokeswoman on health, Giulia Jones, said the Australian Medical Association's report made it clear the ACT came last in the country for too many areas in health.

"I believe we don't need to be, even within the current budget. It would take an attitude of systems reengineering essentially. It has to be structural change," Mrs Jones said.

"Health has become about avoiding political problems rather than having the best system we can have. And we have to get into a different mentality, which is about a mentality of excellence."

Mrs Jones said the ACT could improve the health system within its current budget and with current facilities by changing systems and better integrating services.

"State level politicians are never going to say we have enough money from the federal government," she said.

"But if it was a money problem, we are currently receiving more money than ever before from the federal government. If the federal government can be prevailed upon to provide more money, I'm sure it can be put to excellent use."

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