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Two key performance measures have quietly disappeared from the annual reports of Victorian hospitals in what critics say is a blow for transparency. Health services did not report how many days of cash they had available at the end of each month – or the average time it took all of them to pay trade creditors – in the flurry of documents released last week as part of the state parliamentary “dump day”. These performance measures were included in last year’s annual reports. Victoria’s public hospitals typically aim to have 14 days of available cash at the end of each calendar month for unexpected costs and to avoid the government having to top up their funding. In late 2020, the government also committed to pay supplier invoices from small businesses – such as cleaning or laundry services at smaller health services – within 10 business days for contracts below $3 million. “Dump day” is an annual tradition in which the government publishes hundreds of public documents in just a few hours, leaving journalists little time to scrutinise them.
