The $327 million Digital Health Record may still not be able to produce accurate outpatient wait time data by the last sitting week in 2023, according to an answer to a Question on Notice provided by the ACT Health Minister.

Shadow Health Minister, Leanne Castley, today said it was appalling that Canberrans may not have access to this crucial hospital performance data for a full year since DHR went live in November 2022.

On Monday Ms Castley asked the Auditor-General to conduct a performance audit on DHR after 12 pages in the 2023-24 Budget contained no strategic or accountability data on hospital performance for the 2022-23 year.

“Each year statistics show the abysmal state of The Canberra Hospital’s Emergency Department and elective surgery wait times, but this data is still not available, despite the Minister in February saying it was a ‘month or so’ away and in May that a better dataset would be available ‘before too long’.”

“The Minister was warned that there was a high risk of being unable to provide data publicly for reporting purposes as early as last October, yet she pressed on with go-live of the system the following month.”

“The Minister owes Canberrans an explanation as to why she made the decision to bulldoze ahead with the DHR system when she was briefed that standard performance benchmarks could well not be reported on.”

“I would have hoped that key health statistics would have been available to Canberrans given that the health portfolio received the largest allocation of taxpayer funds and this system cost $327 million.”

“The Auditor-General has written several reports on data issues at Canberra Hospital and I find it astounding that there is still no priority given to public reporting of performance, given the financial and reputational implications.”

“What is more concerning is, it is unclear what data executives, clinicians and the Minister will have access to while this problem persists. How are these decision makers meant to make prudent decisions on policy and staffing if waitlist data has significant delays and needs to be extracted manually?”

Ms Castley said a budget update for CHS for the period between July and September 2022, prior to the introduction of DHR, had revealed that CHS failed to meet two thirds of its targets.