EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (14:12): My question is again to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Are reports of emergency departments failing to cope with casualty flows evidence that, after ten years of Labor and 6¼ years under your leadership, the health system is being mismanaged by the government?

The SPEAKER: Order! Point of order.

The Hon. P.F. CONLON: I don't know how often we have to take the same point of order. You cannot put argument in a question. That was pure argument.

The SPEAKER: I think you need to reword the question.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

Mrs REDMOND: I will reword the question, Madam Speaker.

The SPEAKER: Thank you.

Mrs REDMOND: What explanation would the health minister care to give of the fact that between 1.30 and 2.00pm last Monday, at least eight ambulances at Flinders Medical Centre were being ramped with ambulance crews having to be diverted from the eastern suburbs to cover the southern suburbs? We have also been advised by doctors that at one point on Monday 19 March—

The SPEAKER: Order! Point of order.

The Hon. P.F. CONLON: Again, if the Leader of the Opposition wishes to explain a question, she needs to seek leave of the house.

An honourable member interjecting:

The Hon. P.F. CONLON: Well, it wasn't granted.

Mrs REDMOND: I seek leave to continue my explanation.

The SPEAKER: Well, you actually included it in your question; however, I think it is better if you seek leave.

Mrs REDMOND: I seek leave.

The SPEAKER: Leave is sought, is leave granted?

Mrs REDMOND: Further to that explanation—

The Hon. P.F. Conlon: Follow the rules.

Mrs REDMOND: I will go back and re-explain the beginning. Between 1.30 and 2.00pm last Monday, at least eight ambulances at the Flinders Medical Centre were being ramped, and that resulted in ambulance crews having to be diverted from the eastern suburbs to cover the southern suburbs. Doctors have also advised that at one point on Monday 19 March at the Lyell McEwin Hospital, the emergency department was overwhelmed with 80 casualties, queued to access only 40 treatment bays, and that not enough doctors and nurses were available to deal with the flow of injuries. The question is, what explanation would the minister like to give for those events?

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (14:14:): I thank the Leader of the Opposition for her question. Four minutes is probably not sufficient to properly answer it in the detail that the house deserves, but can I just make some general observations. Firstly, the term 'ramping' is misapplied to the circumstances that occurred on the day that she described.

Ramping is a term that is used in other states to describe ambulances that are parked waiting to bring patients into the emergency department. It is a strategy that is used to keep patients out of the emergency departments. We do not have that policy and nor did it occur on Monday at the hospital. There were a number of ambulances in the driveway but they were empty of patients because the ambulance officers—the paramedics—had taken the patients into the ED where they had been triaged and they were with the patients—

Mr Marshall: So, it's a car park.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: Madam Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition—I think, to her credit—asked a reasonably serious question and I am trying to answer it. The member for Norwood just trivialises it by his smart alec interjections. I think that is a reflection on him and I would say that, if the opposition is serious about trying to deal with these issues, they would avoid the interjections and just listen.

There were a number of ambulances in the car park, but the officers were inside with the patients according to the protocols that are established between the ambulance service and the emergency department. Is this an ideal thing? Of course it is not, but no emergency department anywhere in the world can be big enough to accommodate extra growth in demand in short spikes of time.

That is not the way the world operates. Sometimes there will be more people at an entrance to the emergency department than anybody could possibly envisage. You would not build a system so that there would never, ever be that kind of circumstance. If a bus crashed, for example, and 50 or 60 people—

Mr Pisoni: Did a bus crash?

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: If there were a bus accident—

Mr Pisoni: It sounds like the system crashed.

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Unley, if I speak to again, you will leave the chamber.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: If a bus crashed, and a large number of people suddenly turned up to an emergency department, nobody would question that there were going to be difficulties managing all those people at once.

Ms Chapman: Especially the Minister for Transport.

The SPEAKER: The member for Bragg!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: If 40 or 50 individual incidents all occur at the same time, coincidentally, and 40 or 50 people suddenly appear at the emergency department, then the same circumstances arise and they work out how to manage that. They do it through a process of triaging. Our whole system works as an integrated system so, of course, if there are ambulance officers at the emergency department in one place, they are backfilled with officers elsewhere.

That is how we run the system. That is a reflection of a system that is well run, and I absolutely refute the suggestions made by the opposition that the system is anything but a well-run system. We have a very high quality healthcare system in our state and under our term of government it has improved and we will continue—

Mr WILLIAMS: Point of order, Madam Speaker.

The SPEAKER: What is your point of order?

Mr WILLIAMS: The point of order is one of relevance. The question asked the minister to explain how this circumstance arose. He suggested how it might arise but he has not explained how it did arise.

The SPEAKER: Thank you. I think the minister is answering the question adequately. Minister, have you finished answer?

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order, the member for Norwood!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: It is exactly as it occurred. A number of discrete incidents occurred at once which caused a lot of people to be brought to the emergency department, greater than the normal flow of patients under conventional circumstances. That was a spike in demand. There will always be occasions where there is a spike in demand for any service whether it is a hospital service, a school service, a bus service—any service.

You have to manage that spike and the staff are trained to do it. There are protocols in place between the ambulance service and the emergency departments in the hospitals to manage that, but there were no patients in the ambulances. The patients were in the hospital and the treatment processes had begun.