The ACT government has been accused of allowing some patients to languish on elective surgery waiting lists while others jump the queue to improve health performance data.
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Peter Hughes, president of the ACT Visiting Medical Officers Association, said performance data at Canberra’s two public hospitals was being “manipulated” through a system in which recent entries to category two and three waiting lists were prioritised over patients overdue for elective surgery.
The Health Directorate said it was focusing on patients approaching the overdue date for surgery as well as those who had already been waiting too long.
The government implemented the system at the Canberra Hospital at the start of this year and recently directed Calvary Public Hospital to adopt the same approach to improve the territory’s performance against elective surgery benchmarks.
Dr Hughes said the system was in effect “manipulating surgical waiting lists, to try to make the statistics look better”.
He said some patients entering the category two waiting list were operated on within a few weeks, while others who had been waiting longer than the 90-day benchmark just kept waiting.
One Canberra surgeon, who did not want to be named, said patients who had waited the longest might “never be operated on in the public system”.
“They’re doing this to make things look better than they are, rather than making things better,” he said.
Another surgeon said he had an “unfair” situation where category two patients who had waited less than two months were treated before those who had waited more than a year.
Health director-general Peggy Brown rejected the suggestion that the queueing system had been altered to improve performance statistics.
‘‘This isn’t just about meeting targets,’’ Dr Brown said.
‘‘This is actually about overall trying to reduce the number of people who are waiting too long for their surgery.’’
Dr Brown said the system focused on those patients who were at risk of waiting too long as well as those who had already been classed as long-waits.
“There are those who are close to overdue but not yet overdue. And then there are the people below the line who are overdue,’’ she said.
The system was based on queueing theory and already used in NSW.
Since the system had been introduced, the number of patients experiencing extended waiting times had fallen to a record low of 618.
Opposition Leader Jeremy Hanson said any concerns about waiting lists should be addressed transparently by the government.
‘‘The ACT Labor government has got a track record of manipulating both elective surgery waiting times and emergency department waiting times,’’ Mr Hanson said.
Dr Brown said some patients waited longer than others for operations because surgeons insisted on maintaining their own individual waiting lists instead of working off a central shared list.
‘‘With some surgeons you can get done within two months and if you go to a different surgeon you’ll be waiting six months,’’ she said.
‘‘Is that fair and reasonable? If they absolutely subscribe to that view then let’s have one single waiting list and we’ll take them all in the queue.’’
