A significant investment in public hospital infrastructure and resources is needed to reduce elective surgery waiting lists in public hospitals, says AMA president Dr Andrew Pesce.
He also slammed suggestions from the Australian Private Hospitals Association (APHA) that the government should pay to have public patients treated in private hospitals.
Private hospitals are only operating at about 77% capacity, leaving room for them to carry out an extra 323,000 elective surgery operations every year, according to the APHA.
Elective surgery waiting lists could be wiped out under the proposal, according to the APHA.
“The opportunistic plan being floated by the Australian Private Hospitals Association is only getting attention because our public hospitals have been under-funded and under-resourced for many years,” Dr Pesce said.
Public patients should only ever be treated in a private hospital as a short term measure of last resort, otherwise we risk shifting much-needed medical professionals and resources out of the public system, he said.
The AMA Priority Investment Plan for Australia’s Health System recommends implementing an ongoing monitoring system called Bed Watch that would report on the number of available beds in public hospitals.