FLINDERS MEDICAL CENTRE

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (14:19): Will the Minister for Health and Ageing guarantee that there will be no more ambulance ramping at the Flinders Medical Centre?

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (14:19): I thank the member for her question. As I said in my ministerial statement, what I have done is to ask the health department to investigate the concerns that have been expressed in the public arena on a number of occasions now, led principally by the ambulance union, which has raised these concerns about what has been described as 'ramping'.

I have investigated these on a number of occasions and I thought the delays associated with the ambulances turning around patients was associated with the redevelopment works there which, I have just indicated, have added an extra 10,000 patient capacity to that emergency department. I was surprised and concerned to discover that the issues associated with Flinders continued after that work had been done.

These issues are not brought to my attention at any of the other metropolitan hospitals or, indeed, any of our hospitals in the system. So, if this was a system-wide problem, you would expect to see it on occasions at different hospitals, but it is only occurring at Flinders. So, there was a particular issue at Flinders and I have asked the department to investigate it. There will always be occasions when the capacity issues at any hospital will be completely saturated. You can't always predict the flow of patients. It is not like any other operation or other organisation. There may be something that will happen.

In fact, during a radio interview I did a few weeks ago with Phil Palmer, who was the other guest, I put to him that, if there was a bus accident and 70 patients suddenly turned up, you would expect ambulance officers to take a role and he agreed that that would be what they would do in those circumstances. So, on rare occasions, you would accept ambulances and paramedics taking on part of that emergency care role. Indeed, if there was a car accident or a train crash or something like that in the country, the paramedics go there and they give that sort of emergency care. That is what they do, so they know how to do it.

So, in some circumstances it may occur, but the frequency and the nature of the circumstances in which it was recurring at Flinders was obviously problematic, so that is why I asked for that to be reviewed. I am not suggesting what the outcomes are: I just want a solution to what was happening at Flinders. How it gets resolved will be up to the clinicians working with this independent review.

It won't just be about the emergency department or the ambulances: it will be about how the whole flow of patients works through the hospital, because there are back-end and front-end issues about running emergency departments, such as how many patients come in, but it is also being able to move them on to beds. We want to make sure that that flow is working properly.