DH’s regular performance monitoring enables the collection of important data from health services and Ambulance Victoria on their short-term performance. Longer-term performance data is also important for the public because it provides greater insights into trends over time and improves the accountability and transparency of public health services.

DH is improving its ability to monitor patient safety trends and is working with health services to capture real-time hospital data, and to better use data insights to make improvements at health services.

DH has several key performance measures for timely access to emergency healthcare. One of these is that health services immediately see all triage category 1 patients (with immediately life threatening conditions). From 2013–14 to 2022–23, Victorian health services met this target. However, they did not meet the targets for the following performance measures:

DH, AV and audited health services understand the demand drivers and barriers to timely access to emergency healthcare, and they have implemented various initiatives to address them. We examined 8 initiatives, and 6 of them have mostly achieved their specific goals, which are broader than improving timely access to emergency healthcare. Performance evaluation data for 2 of the 8 initiatives is not available.

However, health services' overall performance against key timeliness measures has not improved over the period we examined between 2013–14 to 2022–23. 

This section summarises our key findings. The numbered sections that follow detail our complete findings, including supporting evidence.

When reaching our conclusions, we consulted with the Department of Health (DH), Ambulance Victoria and 3 health services (The Royal Melbourne Hospital, Werribee Mercy Hospital and Bendigo Hospital) and considered their views. The agencies’ full responses are in Appendix A.

We made 3 recommendations to address 3 issues. The Department of Health accepted 2 recommendations in full and one in principle.

Download a PDF copy of Appendix C: Audit scope and method.

Download a PDF copy of Appendix B: Abbreviations, acronyms and glossary.

Download a PDF copy of Appendix A: Submissions and comments.

All departments have processes for investigating and reporting fraud and corruption incidents when they have been alerted to them by individuals.

Most departments test their procurement data to look for procurement and financial errors. However, only 2 departments use data analytics tests that specifically focus on proactively detecting fraud and corruption risks.

All departments have controls to prevent, detect and investigate fraud and corruption during the procurement process. Examples of these controls include running fraud and corruption training for new employees and having internal processes to report procurement and integrity matters to senior management.

However, departments are at different stages in making sure their controls work as they intended them to. In particular, not all departments make sure that: