TRANSCRIPT:
Stuart is 54, he's a father and grandfather and just a few years ago his friends and family would have described him as a picture of health.
Then in 2022, without any warning, Stuart suffered a life-threatening cardiac emergency.
"Fully healthy, gym, finished playing rugby a few years earlier. Don't drink, don't smoke, eat healthy, perfect blood pressure. Cholesterol was great. I was at work that morning and just felt really dizzy and faint and I couldn't stand up and I've never had that happen to me before. So I just knew my body and I knew there was something that just wasn't quite right. It was right at the last wave of COVID. So I called an ambulance and the ambulance said they were going to be two to three hours, and a work colleague looked at me and said, can you wait that long? I said, I really don't think so. I said, something doesn't feel right."
What Stuart was experiencing was an aortic dissection, or ruptured aorta.
He later found out that he only had a 10 to 15 per cent chance of survival.
When Stuart arrived at the hospital, the receptionist asked him a simple question: Are you admitting yourself as a public or private patient?
He says the answer he gave that day probably saved his life.
"I was sort of confused with that question because I'd never been to hospital before and my instinct would've been to say private. But I actually bounced the question back to her and said, how should I admit to hospital? And she said, what's happening? I said, I think I'm having some sort of major heart issue. I'm just not sure. She said, she looked at me and went public, go public. If you are presenting any critical situation, go public. And I had no idea why there. And then she actually said that to me, but she probably saved my life that day. Just the very fact that I did go public that day probably did save my life."
Stuart had premium private health insurance.
If he had been admitted as a private patient, accessing the lifesaving technology he received may not have been possible.
A new report by healthcare consulting firm HTAnalysts says that patients are waiting an average 4.7 years for clinically proven, lifesaving technologies to get approved in Australia.
Cardiothoracic surgeon Jayme Bennetts says the current approval process creates inequities in patient care.
"Well, I think the main issue is that there is a significant time component to getting new technologies. Now, whether that be an update of existing technologies to be of an improved quality or whether there are new devices and new technologies that aren't currently available, they both go through the same regulatory pathway and that regulatory pathway is taking on average just shy of five years to get new products approved, which means that patients are being unable to access what is potentially a better and an improved way of dealing with their problems, especially with heart pathologies. And that those technologies are already readily available overseas."
The report says that in order for Australia to catch up to global best practice in the US and Germany it must reform to streamline processes, promote alternate funding mechanisms and increase transparency.
Ian Burgess is the CEO of the Medical Technology Association of Australia.
He says these delays have costs for both individuals and the wider health system.
"What this means is that in Australia there's funding and access gaps to new innovative medical technologies, and that directly impacts on patient access. It means there's inequitable patient access and it slows down adoption of medical technologies, new innovation, and when that new innovation can drive enormous value in terms of to an individual patient, better outcomes, better quality of life, and drive efficiency in our health system."
The report calls on the Australian government to establish performance targets for reimbursement times.
It also calls for the development of a provisional funding mechanism for new and innovative technologies in the private sector.
Professor Bennetts says disparities between the private and public sector mean greater inequity in treatments.
"Yeah, so the regulatory pathway really is more limiting in the private sector than the public. Often some of these new technologies are available earlier publicly because they don't need to have the same approval and funding regulatory pathways through to get them to be available in that system."
While he says reform is needed to speed up these regulatory pathways, Professor Bennetts says the regulations exist for good reason.
"I think the pathways are designed to ensure that we have a system that can afford healthcare, but also that we are delivering devices and technologies to patients where there is a proven benefit that is actually one, safety and efficacy for the patient, but two is also cost efficient for the system. So those systems I think are very good and are designed with the right intent. We just need a more efficient pathway of new technologies and devices to be able to be approved quicker."
For people like Stuart, access to the right technology not only saved his life, but made it better.
"I've said it. It was the greatest day of the rest of my life. And people often look at me when I say that game, do you actually mean that? Yes. And people look at me and I say, well, because I'm still here, it saved my life. I mean, little did I know that day that I had a 10-15% chance of living. Your odds aren't good and you need everything to go your way. But 20 years ago, if I had an aortic dissection, I wouldn't have lived. And that's just showing that what the medical technology has done since then. I've had two new grandkids, my kids have had kids, but I'm just enjoying life so much more. I'm probably the person I always wanted to be now because I'm more relaxed with everything. People say it's a second chance of life, but it's not it's just realising how lucky you were."
