“State health ministers have been ordered to design ways to admit fewer people to hospital and release patients only when they are ready to leave in exchange for incentive payments to be rolled out by the Rudd Government,” The Australian reports today

Ah, if only it was so simple! Here’s hoping Nicola Roxon has studied some of the recent rows that have consumed British Labor over NHS waiting lists and treatment times.

Daily Telegraph and Spectator columnist Theodore Dalrymple commented on one:

All doctors working in British hospitals have long known but many have been afraid to say that decisions affecting the treatment of patients are being made not on proper clinical grounds but merely to meet government targets that were themselves devised, and are now being used, to make crude party political propaganda. Hospitals are complex organisms: they have to treat not only people who come to casualty departments but people with acne, constipation and all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. They are always delicate balancing acts.

The Blair Government became obsessed with a four-hour waiting time for accident and emergency services.

Accident and Emergency (A&E) services are the main way patients in the UK access urgently needed medical care,” a paper published last year by the Business School at London’s City University looking at demand management stated. However, long waiting times have resulted in widespread criticism over a period of years and were repeatedly the most important complaint in patient satisfaction surveys.

It went on to tell how the attempts to shorten waiting times have had some curious consequences. If governments spend more money on reducing waiting times in emergency departments more people turn up, attracted by the quicker service. Health costs go up further.

If you let waiting times increase, fewer people will attend. This may help the budget, but more people will die. Some may end up with even more costly medical conditions. In the end, this can hurt both political perceptions and the bottom line.

See the issue that we’re dealing with?

The art of health management is to find an optimal waiting time that minimises budgetary costs, maximises patient throughput and minimises deaths and medical complications that will continue.

Simply pouring in more money to cut waiting times is counter-productive. Our new government, with their fist full of dollars, are seemingly unaware of this study and its implications for elective surgery waiting times.

If they press on, it will be interesting to see the statistics – and the spin – in twelve months or so as the states try to fiddle the lists to show the expected reduction in queues in the face of the people with acne and constipation who will believe they are entitled to hospital treatment.