Just under half of the department’s 200 objectives remain unfulfilled, department secretary Euan Wallace has revealed.
The Victorian Department of Health met just over half of its performance objectives for the 2022-23 financial year, according to Department Secretary Euan Wallace.
Mr Wallace told committee members at an estimates hearing last week that just under half of the 200 targets across activity, quality and workforce remained unfulfilled, including objectives in mental health, aged care, nursing student placements, and unplanned hospital readmissions.
“When the department is looking at our performance across the year, we broadly look at activity, quality and workforce and we have now about 200-201 measures for ‘22-23, slightly more than the year before,” Mr Wallace said.
“We delivered on just over half of those, in health we met 60%-70% of our quality targets, in aged care 75%, about half [in] mental health and ambulance [services], almost 80%.”
According to Mr Wallace, the department’s “key failings” in health were unfulfilled targets for hospital readmissions, particularly unplanned readmissions among patients having hip replacements, tonsillectomies and those who had acute myocardial infarction.
Other unsuccessful objectives included wait times for category three and category two surgeries, as well as ED wait times and patient experience while in ED.
To reduce rates of unplanned readmissions across Victoria, quality improvement agent Safer Care Victoria had implemented initiatives across its clinical, cardiovascular and paediatric learning networks to identify the conditions contributing to the highest rates of readmissions, Mr Wallace said.
The covid pandemic was the primary explanation for the continued unmet targets across 2021, 2022 and 2023, with the department continuing to absorb the implications of clinic closures, surgery delays and chronic workforce shortages across the sector.
“The explanations of why we didn’t get to activity, the reasons in 2021-22 are a wee bit different to those in ‘22-23,” Mr Wallace said.
“In ‘21-22 it was mostly covid so it’s mostly lockdowns, mostly successions of surgeries, and closure of clinics, etc.
“In ‘22-23, while still dealing with significant covid challenges, the activity challenges were ones of recovery and then workforce and most of our non-delivery of activity targets was around workforce challenges, retention recruitment and replacement to workforce.”
During the hearing, Mr Wallace was also grilled about the availability and performance of Victoria’s priority primary care centres, with the secretary confirming that opening hours and staffing levels varied across the 28 clinics currently operating.
“So that 28 and soon to be 29 [clinics], the opening hours and facilities will vary, it’s about access challenges, and out-of-pocket costs,” Mr Wallace said.
In response to claims that the centres’ hybrid staffing model created more work for GPs rather than less, Mr Wallace said such claims were a “mischaracterisation” of the way the clinics operated.
“This is not about replacing the services where people have established relationships and trusted relationships with the GP, going for intensive medication or follow-up care etc,” he told committee members.
“Urgent primary care needs have been increasingly made by emergency departments, emergency departments aren’t the right place, so it’s about providing the care needs for people.
“It’s not that people are turning up to the wrong place, it’s about providing the care that they need.
“That’s what the PPCCs are doing.”
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