ED and Surgery waiting times
According to the AIHW, the procedure with the lowest median waiting time in 2005 06 was coronary artery bypass graft (15 days); the procedure with the longest wait time was total knee replacement (178 days). There were also variations in waiting times for these procedures across jurisdictions; Queensland patients waited a median time of 41 days for cataract surgery, while those in Tasmania waited a median time of 389 days.
Source: Australian Parliamentary Library
How can hospital emergency department and surgery waiting times be cut?
Cut doctors pay and hire more?
Create specialised sub-professions without the comprehensive training costs?
Something else?
In the US context there’s a straightforward way to reduce education expensives for doctors. Make medical school not require a bachlor degree but allow students straight out of high school to go to medical school like it’s possible in Europe. I don’t know how the situation in Australia looks like.
Professional bodies often prevent nurses from doing many tasks for which they are qualified. Allowing cheaper nurses to do more tasks would reduce costs. Professional bodies also limit the amount of new doctors. As a health care priority we likely want to train more doctors than we currently do. You can’t simply hire more doctors when you free up money by paying doctors less. There a limited amount of doctors trained and when you have lower pay as a doctor it will be more attractive for them to switch careers.
When it comes to waiting times it’s also worth remembering that they aren’t always bad. The reduce incentives for overtreating patients. A while ago a doctor told me about health care economics: “Every hospital bed finds it’s patient.” Doctors have a lot of power to advice patients to engage in medical interventions and when a doctor has a lot of free slots he is likely to talk patients into treatments that aren’t good. When the doctor has a waiting list he thinks a lot more about whether the intervention is actually good for the patient. He then acts more as a good advisor then as a surgery salesman.
At this point, there hasn’t been a lot of analysis about why waiting times are as long as they are, so start by taking a detailed look at the procedures.
This seems to me like an instinctually bad idea, although I wouldn’t be able to tell you why.
Aside from that, the first thing that comes to mind would be to create an incentive for doing surgeries quickly—the surgeon who’s average waiting time is lowest gets a bonus—but that would have very bad, not good, horrible side effects.
This has, I think, the highest potential. One would need to fight against entrenched lobbies and status quo bias, but in theory it would help a lot.
Alternatively, a possibility could be creating a specialized administrative role in hospitals whose sole purpose is to organize doctor’s time...but I would be surprised if it didn’t already exist.
Probably concerns about quality.
The supply curve typically slopes the other way.