Dr Rosalie Woodruff MP | Greens Health spokesperson
The Department of Health’s Annual Report highlights the appalling continued decline of Tasmania’s health system under the Liberals.
The Liberals have neglected health for close to a decade, and we’re seeing distressing new records set for poor outcomes across the system. These grim results are further evidence of this government’s shocking and dangerous failure to care for Tasmanians.
Overall, the Tasmanian Health Service failed nearly 70% of its performance targets for 2021-22.
Key failures include:
- More than half the patients admitted to the LGH through the Emergency Department waited over eight hours in the ED
- Only 38% of patients at the Royal Hobart Hospital Emergency Department were seen within clinically recommended timeframes
- More than 40% of patients arriving at the LGH by ambulance, and 35% at the RHH, were ramped
- Ambulance response times were again over 14 minutes on average – the slowest in the nation
The government also failed on each one of their five key performance targets in the Statewide Elective Surgery Plan.
The Rockliff Government has its priorities all wrong. They could give Health the funding it needs if they followed the lead of other states and made big mining and fish farm corporations, and property developers, pay their fair share.
Instead the Liberals continue to prioritise in the wrong direction, starving the Budget of hundreds of millions of dollars for an unnecessary third stadium, rather than putting more into critical health services.
Premier Rockliff needs to stop pretending his ‘steady as it goes’ approach is going to result in anything other than a deepening disaster in healthcare, and start taking the ambitious and urgent action needed to make a real difference to people’s lives.