The State of Our Public Hospitals Report – A Technology Assessment Free Zone!

The following report has been actually been published today:

Australian Health Care Agreements

The state of our public hospitals, June 2009 report

The state of our public hospitals, June 2009 report provides a snapshot of public and private hospital activity in 2007-08. The 2009 report is based on data collected in 2007-08.

The 2009 report includes four feature chapters. The first feature is titled "Turning our public hospitals around" and provides information about hospital reform directions agreed between the Commonwealth and all State and Territory Governments. The second, titled "Our maternity services", provides information on the number and type of maternity services provided by hospitals and their associated costs. The third feature titled "Indigenous Australians in hospital" describes Indigenous hospital use compared to that of other Australians. The final feature is titled "State and territory public hospital performance reporting" and includes details of state and territory online hospital reporting.

The report can be downloaded in full from the following link:

The state of our public hospitals, June 2009 report in full (PDF 2971 KB)

The full page with sub-section downloads is here:

http://health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/health-ahca-sooph-index09.htm

From an e-Health perspective this one gets an F-.

The report lacks any assessment of the use of either clinical or information technologies – and provides no detail of where technology fits in the claimed feature on "Turning our public hospitals around".

Pages 60-65 do not even mention the use of Health IT to improve hospital efficiency and safety etc. Just hopeless I believe.

Worse we also find stupid Government penny pinching causing the following comment:

“Private hospitals provide numbers of beds and admitted patient care data to states and territories and where available, this information has been included in this report. Private hospital establishment data is usually collected by the ABS annually. However this data was not collected in 2007–08 and cannot be reflected in this report.

Yes! They cut the ABS (The Australian Bureau of Statistics) funding so we travel in an information vacuum!

These people are operating in the hospital system management paradigm of the 1970’s or earlier!

David.

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