Health ministers to meet on virus surge

With the fourth wave of Omicron cases leading to a fresh peak of infections, Mr Butler said it was causing extra pressure on the health system.

Mr Butler said the meeting with state and territory ministers would take place next week.

"The fourth Omicron wave of 2022 is obviously an additional pressure that we're seeing, not only through the hospital systems around the country, but also in aged care facilities as well," he told reporters in Melbourne on Wednesday.

"We're working as hard as we can, particularly to protect the most vulnerable in the community from severe disease and hospitalisations, but that is having pressure on elective surgeries in a number of jurisdictions because of the impact on staff."

Figures released on Wednesday by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed elective surgery numbers at public hospitals had fallen to a 10-year low due to the impact of COVID-19.

There were 623,000 elective surgeries at public hospitals in the 2021/22 financial year, the lowest level since 2010/11.

The steep decline in elective surgeries came as a result of widespread COVID-19 restrictions during the Delta waves in 2021 and the Omicron surge of early 2022.

Institute spokesman Adrian Webster said the drop in surgeries followed on from initial shutdowns of elective procedures during the early stages of the pandemic.

"This followed periodic suspensions of lower-urgency elective surgery starting from March 2020, which have aimed to help ensure the health system maintains adequate capacity during the pandemic," he said.

"An elective surgery is medically necessary and may be urgent, but applies where the patient's clinical condition does not require immediate care through an emergency admission."

Opposition health spokeswoman Anne Ruston said COVID had created large backlogs for elective surgery that needed to be dealt with.

"We also have a great deal of concern amongst the community about going into our health settings. We continue to see surges of COVID, we see one right now, and the impact of that is of course there is a reticence for elective surgery," she said.

"What we need is for the government to put a plan in place that starts to address what we know is coming down the pipeline ... but we also need to recognise that there will be no one solution to this, it has to be a broad range of solutions."

Australian Medical Association president Steve Robson said elective surgery performance at public hospitals had deteriorated.

"While the AIHW data reveals that wait times for essential elective surgery decreased in 2021/22, this is most likely the result of fewer patients being added to the waiting list to receive surgery," he said.

"Clearly the way in which we fund our public hospital system is broken when we are forced to rely on the private system to treat our public patients."

Meanwhile, figures from the Actuaries Institute revealed more than half of excess deaths in Australia in the first eight months this year were due to COVID-19.

Deaths from the virus peaked in the last week of July, before decreasing during August.

Australian Associated Press