HEALTH — KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
447. Ms L. METTAM to the Minister for Health:
I refer to the record 6 982 hours
of ambulance ramping last month and this government's plan to fix St
John Ambulance, as outlined in today's The West Australian and
referred to in the tabled report. Given that the minister is setting new KPIs
to hold St John accountable for its perceived failings in the health system,
will she also set KPIs for the government and the Department of Health to
address their multiple failings, including growing elective surgery waitlists
and emergency department wait times, exceeding recommended triage times and
having ever-increasing code yellows and bed state blacks?
Ms A.
SANDERSON replied:
To assert that somehow hospitals
and the Department of Health are not held to KPIs or standards is completely
and utterly ridiculous. We publish the annual report; health service providers
publish. Every day, we can see the activity
in emergency departments online. Every single day, we can go online and see
emergency department activity live. There is the emergency department Western
Australia Emergency Access Target—WEAT—the four-hour rule and the elective surgery median wait time.
There are all the things that we are held to, and to which our national
funding is tied. I am sensing from the question from the opposition that,
somehow, government contracts should not be held to a standard—that,
somehow, imposing KPIs on the ambulance service is an unreasonable request! It
is an absolutely appropriate request. There are KPIs currently. The issue is
that this contract was kicked down the road, and it was kicked down the road in
the eight and a half years that members opposite were in government. When we
hit the pandemic, we extended the contract. We are now working to modernise the
ambulance contract and to work hand in hand with our partner St John Ambulance
to deliver an ambulance service across the entire state—a very
different ambulance service. This is a game changer and a reset for how we
deliver those ambulance services. We have
had record investment in those ambulance services from this government. The
funding to St John Ambulance increased by 16 per cent over the two years
of the pandemic. We are putting $50 million into country ambulance services. It
is a very reasonable—in fact, responsible—requirement that that
ambulance service has KPIs when it comes to delivering those services.