I'm advised:

The NSW Health policy PD2022_001 Elective Surgery Access provides guidance to NSW public hospital teams that manage elective surgery services to ensure that management of access for patients across the state is clinically appropriate, consistent and equitable.

The Ministry of Health has strategies in place to ensure planned surgery referrals are managed in an equitable and timely way, including:

• Key Performance Indicators for surgery that are included in annual Service Agreements with local health districts and specialty health networks and monitored under the NSW Health Performance Framework.
• Monthly monitoring of planned surgery performance indicators that are nationally benchmarked. These indicators are the number of overdue surgeries and percentage of planned surgeries completed within the clinically recommended timeframe - not the variance between reported and recalculated breach which is a metric created by EY for the report.
• When local health districts and speciality health networks experience demand and capacity challenges that affect the delivery of surgery, action plans are developed by districts and networks to increase planned surgery performance with subject matter expert support is provided by the Ministry of Health.
• Monthly meetings occur with local health district and specialty health network surgical waitlist leads, and bi-monthly education sessions are held with booking office staff to ensure that patients on the surgical waitlist are managed appropriately.
• Periodic reviews of waitlists to check compliance with the Elective Surgery Access policy are undertaken. The policy is being reviewed to further strengthen and clarify the roles and responsibilities of the sites to manage their waitlists based on clinical need.

Hunter New England Local Health District has implemented strategies to ensure consistency with waitlist policy and surgical performance monitoring in the District, including:

• Executive Northern and Southern Surgical Network Governance meetings and development of a 5-year Surgical Strategy based on the Elective Surgery Access policy, which provides the framework for providing surgical services within District facilities.
• Regularly reviewing current and projected waiting lists, and discuss numbers of patients overdue in each clinical urgency category, waitlist removals and risks and challenges.
• Building capacity in the waitlist teams, including education on appropriate clinical urgency categorisation, treat in turn principles, clerical waitlist auditing responsibilities, and other policy compliance requirements.
• Development of consumer resources to provide waiting time information. This information is shared across waitlist teams to provide information about waiting times for patients who are waiting for surgery.