Public hospitals in regional Victoria expect it will take the entire calendar year to get through a backlog of surgeries that have been delayed during the pandemic.
Heads of two regional health services gave evidence on Tuesday to Victoria's new Pandemic Declaration Accountability and Oversight Committee.
Goulburn Valley Health chief executive Matt Sharp said more than 1,000 people were currently waiting for surgery in his region, compared to 632 in early 2020.
In the west of the state, Grampians Health chief executive Dale Fraser said his organisation's elective surgery waiting list had grown from 1,254 patients before the pandemic, to 1,415.
Tough tasks ahead
Both health service heads estimated it would take about a year for waiting lists to return to steady pre-pandemic levels.
However, Mr Sharp said that was largely dependent on staffing numbers.
"GV Health has had some underlying recruitment challenges that predate the pandemic," Mr Sharp said.
Mr Fraser said his service had "done a lot more of the easier work" during the past two years, but the surgery backlog now contained "some of the more complex" category 2 and 3 procedures.
In Ballarat, the wait time for category 3 procedures has increased by 46 days to 350 on average, while the average wait time for a category 2 procedure is now about 92 days.
However, Mr Fraser said the pandemic had not affected the Grampians region as severely as other regional centres.
His service did not cancel any staff leave or recall any absent staff during the recent Code Brown declaration.
A Code Brown is a formal emergency management structure that aims to make the best use of hospital resources.
In January, the Victorian Government declared a Code Brown emergency as the state's hospital system struggled under huge staff shortages and increased hospitalisations due to repeated COVID outbreaks.
Orders often confusing
The committee also asked the health service heads about any challenges they faced in implementing pandemic orders and health advice from governments.
Mr Sharp said his service had trouble trying to decipher "complex documents", occasionally with conflicting directions, during outbreaks.
He said he regularly contacted the state health department for clarification and that it would be helpful if, in future, the complex legal documents were simplified into fact sheets.
Veronica Jamison, CEO of Shepparton Villages, a private not-for profit aged care service, told the committee a single body should be responsible for managing COVID-19 in residential aged care settings.
Shepparton Villages is federally funded, and Ms Jamison said it often had to "serve two masters" in the state and Commonwealth governments.
Most residents and their families understood the restrictive visitation requirements they had to impose, she said, but some felt like they were "in jail".
Mr Fraser said the state supply of material to his service's aged care homes, such as personal protective equipment, had worked well.
However, he said the equivalent Commonwealth program was, at times, "random".
"I had a phone call from a delivery vehicle company about three weeks ago wanting to deliver me goods from the Commonwealth, and they were driving around Geelong looking for me."
