PM: Our plan for better health and better hospitals for Australia aims to significantly reduce the currently unacceptably long waiting times in hospital emergency departments. It should be unacceptable- here we are in 2010- for people in Australia still to have to wait over eight hours in an emergency department before they are treated. We must do everything we physically can to reduce the waiting times in this nation's public hospitals. We can do better, and we must do better. And we intend now to do better.
That is why what we're announcing today is a new, four hour target for all public hospital emergency departments right across the nation, and we intend to deliver this first and foremost in the more than 165 emergency departments of our major hospitals across the country. Under the new four hour target, public hospitals will be expected to ensure that patients who present to an emergency department within four hours are either- one, admitted to hospital; two, referred to follow-up treatment; or three, treated and discharged.
To help public hospitals reach this new national four hour target, the Government intends to invest half a billion dollars, the equivalent of an additional 1.2 million emergency department services, across the country. Financial incentives will be attached to these targets. Where a state's public hospitals meet or beat that target, hospitals in that state will be eligible for additional health funding.
The Government will begin providing $150 million from 1 July of this year, 2010, in upfront payments to help states and territories with the costs of moving towards this four hour target. This investment will provide additional capacity, also equipment and planning in hospitals to deliver improvements in the performance of emergency departments, and lift hospitals to new and higher standards required under what we've defined as the new National Health and Hospitals Network.
(The video related to this transcript is available from the Multimedia section of this website.)