3 days ago
- Health
- Sydney Morning Herald
NSW elective surgery waiting lists approach pandemic levels
In a grim failure that threatens the NSW health system, the Minns government has been unable to maintain its early momentum to reduce elective surgery waiting hospital lists.
After some initial success cutting the backlog, waiting lists have crept back close to COVID-19 pandemic levels, thanks to rising demand from the state's ageing and increasingly unwell population.
The failure is there to see in the latest quarterly report card by the independent Bureau of Health Information: at the end of March, the bureau found 100,678 patients awaited surgery in NSW public hospitals, just 346 short of the record peak hit when elective surgeries were paused during COVID. Patients needing urgent surgery waited an average of 13 days, the wait for non-urgent surgery blew out to 322 days – over a month longer than the same time last year. More than 8000 of those patients had waited longer than clinically recommended by their surgeons, including 3000 patients requiring semi-urgent surgery within three months.
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In March 2023, just days after he was sworn in, Premier Chris Minns flagged reducing the elective surgery waiting list as his health ministry's priority, announcing a 'surgical care taskforce' to tackle the crisis in public hospitals. He directed Health Minister Ryan Park to look at the more than 100,000 people then on a waiting list, a list that included 4000 children and 17,000 who had been waiting longer than clinically recommended. By the end of that year, the number of patients overdue for surgery had declined to pre-pandemic levels.
The impetus continued. Between January and March this year, NSW surgeons performed 1800 more surgeries than they did in the first three months of last year. But in May, the final report from the Special Commission of Inquiry, warned that while NSW Health remained funded and resourced, in the main, as a reactive system that treated acutely unwell people in public hospitals, there was a substantial risk that it would soon be overwhelmed by a huge increase in healthcare demands from an ageing population.
And so it quickly has proven. However, the veracity of the latest waitlist could possibly have been undermined by hospitals cutting corners to meet government-enforced benchmarks. Last week, the Herald reported doctors had accused some NSW hospital administrators of 'buffing the numbers' to meet their publicly reported targets with hospitals and refusing to accept patients for cancer surgery and other time-critical procedures.
Among the allegations made by doctors at Sydney's RPA and Westmead hospitals, which followed an ABC investigation into similar behaviour at Orange Hospital last month, are that hospitals had been effectively refusing patients because they would not be able to perform their surgery within the recommended timeframe, or changing the categories of patients.
Governments have ignored the impact of demography and baby boomers on the health system. While the Minns government broke ground in reining back elective surgery waiting lists, the latest figures suggest they have broken away. Good medicine demands patients not endure those long, awful waits.
