Liberals want an independent investigation into hospital stats fraud

rhino said :

mezza76 said :

rhino said :

So it was one senior administrator guy at the hospital? Or is he just the scapegoat? Seems unlikely that one person would fudge the numbers on one occasion after never having spoken to anyone else there about it.

And what motivated him to do so? It was the waiting times particularly that were altered, it seems. So does the hospital get less funding if the waiting times are higher? Or did he make them worse in order to get more funding? The impression I get is that he altered them to make the waiting times sound better than they really are. Is the system set up so that the better the waiting times, the more money you get? That would seem a bad metric, because if more people come in, more money is required and wait times would be worse.

They get reward payments based on the % of patients seen within the target benchmark. You miss the benchmark, you miss the payment. It’s a horrible metric based on the UK model, which they are now abandoning. I hate it with a passion. There are far better ways to measure access block and ED performance than the 3 hr target adopted.

That does sound like a pretty rubbish metric. If there is a disaster or outbreak of something causing them to get a backlog of people, they are given less money to handle it.

What is the new metric they will employ, I wonder?

I should point out that the metric is qualified based on where clinically appropriate. Even so I think the bias is pushed to dealing with certain cases over others to ensure your stats are in line with the benchmark. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I usually want my clinicians in EDs just thinking about patient care.., not benchmarks.

The best metric was the one they just moved away from – the amount of CAT patients seen by the clinically recommended time, as per the AIHW.

mezza76 said :

rhino said :

So it was one senior administrator guy at the hospital? Or is he just the scapegoat? Seems unlikely that one person would fudge the numbers on one occasion after never having spoken to anyone else there about it.

And what motivated him to do so? It was the waiting times particularly that were altered, it seems. So does the hospital get less funding if the waiting times are higher? Or did he make them worse in order to get more funding? The impression I get is that he altered them to make the waiting times sound better than they really are. Is the system set up so that the better the waiting times, the more money you get? That would seem a bad metric, because if more people come in, more money is required and wait times would be worse.

They get reward payments based on the % of patients seen within the target benchmark. You miss the benchmark, you miss the payment. It’s a horrible metric based on the UK model, which they are now abandoning. I hate it with a passion. There are far better ways to measure access block and ED performance than the 3 hr target adopted.

That does sound like a pretty rubbish metric. If there is a disaster or outbreak of something causing them to get a backlog of people, they are given less money to handle it.

What is the new metric they will employ, I wonder?

rhino said :

So it was one senior administrator guy at the hospital? Or is he just the scapegoat? Seems unlikely that one person would fudge the numbers on one occasion after never having spoken to anyone else there about it.

And what motivated him to do so? It was the waiting times particularly that were altered, it seems. So does the hospital get less funding if the waiting times are higher? Or did he make them worse in order to get more funding? The impression I get is that he altered them to make the waiting times sound better than they really are. Is the system set up so that the better the waiting times, the more money you get? That would seem a bad metric, because if more people come in, more money is required and wait times would be worse.

They get reward payments based on the % of patients seen within the target benchmark. You miss the benchmark, you miss the payment. It’s a horrible metric based on the UK model, which they are now abandoning. I hate it with a passion. There are far better ways to measure access block and ED performance than the 3 hr target adopted.

Jim Jones said :

SnapperJack said :

HenryBG said :

Yep. If the Libs were in charge, none of this would ever have happened…

Well actually it probably wouldn’t have. I can’t recall painfully long waiting times and bureaucratic corruption at TCH when Kate Carnell and Gary Humphries were the Chief Ministers. Of course we have to put up with people making excuses for amateurish incompetence and bungling ineptitude in the city of the Labor/Greens true believers.

There was also a hell of a lot less traffic on the roads back when Kate Carnell and Gary Humphries were the Chief Ministers.

From this we can deduce that the Labor government has been responsible for an unprecedented increase of cars on the roads that would never had happened had the Liberals been in power.

It’s also quite surprising that a fan of the Liberal party would actually bring up Kate Carnell’s name in the context of hospitals……Just goes to show how devoid of commonsense Liberal supporters have to be in this town.

rhino said :

So it was one senior administrator guy at the hospital? Or is he just the scapegoat? Seems unlikely that one person would fudge the numbers on one occasion after never having spoken to anyone else there about it.

And what motivated him to do so? It was the waiting times particularly that were altered, it seems. So does the hospital get less funding if the waiting times are higher? Or did he make them worse in order to get more funding? The impression I get is that he altered them to make the waiting times sound better than they really are. Is the system set up so that the better the waiting times, the more money you get? That would seem a bad metric, because if more people come in, more money is required and wait times would be worse.

Why are you saying the delinquent administrator is male? Last time I was at TCH there were a lot more females than males. The place is run by women which is probably why it is so much strife.

So it was one senior administrator guy at the hospital? Or is he just the scapegoat? Seems unlikely that one person would fudge the numbers on one occasion after never having spoken to anyone else there about it.

And what motivated him to do so? It was the waiting times particularly that were altered, it seems. So does the hospital get less funding if the waiting times are higher? Or did he make them worse in order to get more funding? The impression I get is that he altered them to make the waiting times sound better than they really are. Is the system set up so that the better the waiting times, the more money you get? That would seem a bad metric, because if more people come in, more money is required and wait times would be worse.

SnapperJack said :

HenryBG said :

Yep. If the Libs were in charge, none of this would ever have happened…

Well actually it probably wouldn’t have. I can’t recall painfully long waiting times and bureaucratic corruption at TCH when Kate Carnell and Gary Humphries were the Chief Ministers. Of course we have to put up with people making excuses for amateurish incompetence and bungling ineptitude in the city of the Labor/Greens true believers.

There was also a hell of a lot less traffic on the roads back when Kate Carnell and Gary Humphries were the Chief Ministers.

From this we can deduce that the Labor government has been responsible for an unprecedented increase of cars on the roads that would never had happened had the Liberals been in power.

milkman said :

HenryBG said :

milkman said :

HenryBG said :

Yep. If the Libs were in charge, none of this would ever have happened…

Yeah, but the Libs weren’t in charge, Labor were. And this DID happen.

Are you trying to defend those who did this?

The point is that the hospital isn’t run by a political party.

On another note – it’s lucky the ACT Government didn’t get to take over Calvary, or we’d have twice as much fraud to deal with.

Perhaps the people who run Calvary could provide advice to the ACT Government on the subject of ethics and morality?

The hospital is run by the hospital administration, who is funded by and accountable to the govt at the time, who happen to be a Labor govt.

The issue shouldn’t be which political party is in power, or who runs the hospital… the reason this happens is that States and Territories don’t have the funding they need to keep up with the unrestrained demand. Therefore the promise of federal funding means that cooking the books or ‘reclassification’ of a few patients in an ED means millions of dollars to the hospital… every State and Territory would do it to an extent.

My concern isn’t that the books were cooked – it’s that the obsession with performance metrics might skew clinical care in order to meet the reward payments.

HenryBG said :

milkman said :

HenryBG said :

Yep. If the Libs were in charge, none of this would ever have happened…

Yeah, but the Libs weren’t in charge, Labor were. And this DID happen.

Are you trying to defend those who did this?

The point is that the hospital isn’t run by a political party.

On another note – it’s lucky the ACT Government didn’t get to take over Calvary, or we’d have twice as much fraud to deal with.

Perhaps the people who run Calvary could provide advice to the ACT Government on the subject of ethics and morality?

The hospital is run by the hospital administration, who is funded by and accountable to the govt at the time, who happen to be a Labor govt.

milkman said :

HenryBG said :

Yep. If the Libs were in charge, none of this would ever have happened…

Yeah, but the Libs weren’t in charge, Labor were. And this DID happen.

Are you trying to defend those who did this?

The point is that the hospital isn’t run by a political party.

On another note – it’s lucky the ACT Government didn’t get to take over Calvary, or we’d have twice as much fraud to deal with.

Perhaps the people who run Calvary could provide advice to the ACT Government on the subject of ethics and morality?