Report on Government Services 2009
The Productivity Commission has released the Report on Government Services 2009. This is the 14th edition of the report, produced by a Steering Committee of senior officials from Australian, state and territory governments for the Australian Council of Australian Governments.
The report’s coverage includes: government services and Indigenous people; public hospitals; primary and community health; breast cancer detection and management; mental health; aged care services; services for people with a disability; and out-of-home care services; SAAP; and delivery of Commonwealth rent assistance.
In hospitals, the report shows there were 187 major adverse (sentinel) events across Australia, 49 of which were in Queensland public hospitals in 2006-2007, almost a quarter of the national total for that financial year. The state with the second highest number of such events was Victoria with 45, South Australia with 36, New South Wales with 32, Western Australia with 15, the ACT with seven, the Northern Territory with two and Tasmania with one.
They range from operations on the wrong patient or body part, leaving surgical instruments inside the body, death in child birth and infants discharged to the wrong family.
The report says there were 33 procedures in Queensland involving the wrong patient or body part compared to six years before. There were 29 in South Australia, 20 in Victoria, nine in New South Wales, six in Western Australia and one in Tasmania. On 25 occasions across Australia people needed to have second operations to remove surgical instruments. This occurred nine times in New South Wales, eight in Victoria, three in both Queensland and South Australia, and it happened twice in WA.
Of the 14 cases in which patients died after being given the wrong medication, six of them happened in Queensland (five more than the previous year), followed by New South Wales (three), Victoria (three) and WA (two).
As well as the serious sentinel events, the report measured infection rates in four key procedures – hip replacement, knee reconstruction, lower segment caesarean section and abdominal hysterectomy. Queensland had much lower rates of infection in the four procedures than the other states and territories. The most common procedure was knee replacements, and the infection rate for this operation was 1.7% in New South Wales, 1.5% in Victoria, 0.4% in Queensland and 0.6% in Western Australia.
