May 2005

Website gives patients priority pick

An innovative new website will allow patients seeking elective surgery to take a short-cut to treatment at Victoria’s public hospitals.

Health Minister Bronwyn Pike said the Your Hospitals website would, for the first time, allow patients and their doctors to compare hospitals’ waiting times for different procedures, as part of reforms that will see the Government report on a range of new indicators of hospital performance.

‘This major reform heralds a new approach in the way that this Government manages elective surgery waiting lists.

‘It is an approach that will make a real difference to Victorians,’ Ms Pike said.

‘With the launch of the website and report, the Government will be providing more information to the public on the performance of our hospitals than any other State in Australia.

‘But it’s not just about more information, it’s also about more meaningful information.

‘This reform will empower patients and doctors to book operations at a hospital which minimises their wait.

‘The comparative times—for a wide range of procedures—will be updated quarterly and are a key component of a commitment to not only make Victoria’s health system more open, transparent and accountable but make it work better for patients.

‘This new resource will put people and their doctors in control of their choice of hospital by providing them with comparative information and will help improve the health system through greater accountability.’

Patients and their doctors will be able to look up the average time that patients wait for particular elective surgery procedures.

They will be able to compare lists, find hospitals with shorter times to treatment and make a decision whether to seek a booking.

Ms Pike said a range of factors determined the time to treatment for patients, such as the high demand for emergency surgery at some of the major hospitals and the difficulty in attracting local surgeons in some specialties.

Ms Pike said the new Your Hospitals report—at http://www.health.vic.gov.au/yourhospitals—replaced the Hospital Services Report and provided expanded information about the health of Victorians and the performance of public hospitals.

‘The old report contained table after table of figures and was rarely sighted by average Victorians,’ Ms Pike said.

‘This new report for the six months to the end of December provides information about the performance of our hospitals and better explains in simple language how they work.

The indicators found in the old report would be retained in Your Hospitals with at least 18 extra information categories not contained in the Hospital Services Report.

These include:

• Hospital rebuilding program and progress;

• Total bed capacity of Victorian hospitals;

• Hospital cleanliness;

• Patients treated in specialist outpatient clinics;

• Percentage of time on hospital bypass;

• Same-day treatment numbers;

• Patients treated in community mental health outpatient clinics;

• Urgency categories of patients in emergency departments;

• Median treatment times for elective surgery;

• Patient satisfaction survey details;

• Doctor and nurse recruitment.

Other extra information categories include health funding, hospital performance against targets, bulk billing trends, dental care statistics, federal funding trends impacting on Victoria's hospitals, immunisation statistics, breast and cervical cancer screening and doctor and nurse recruitment.

Ms Pike said the report showed hospitals treated 394,402 patients in emergency departments for the six months to the end of December, up by 5,054 on the same period the previous year.

Median admission times for all categories of elective surgery patients far exceeded the standard.

All urgent patients received their treatment within 30 days—half of them within seven days.

From July to December, emergency departments went on hospital bypass just 2.7 per cent of the time—which was better than the Government’s target of three per cent.

In the same period, 82 per cent of ED patients treated and needing admission were transferred to a ward bed within 12 hours.

• Copies of the Your Hospitals report can be obtained by calling Information Victoria on 1300 366 356.