FLINDERS MEDICAL CENTRE

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (14:16): My question is again to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Given the minister's statement that the acting manager of the emergency department at Flinders Medical Centre has to guarantee ambulance offload at all times, has the government—

The Hon. P.F. CONLON: Point of order: it is an argument that he said that; in fact, he didn't.

Mrs REDMOND: He just said it, but I will reword the question.

The SPEAKER: Order! Yes, I think you need to reword that question. I uphold that point of order.

Mrs REDMOND: To the Minister for Health: has the government guaranteed 'inpatient flow into the hospital' for the acting manager of Flinders emergency department, which it refused to guarantee for Dr Di King, leading to her resignation?

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (14:17): This is another example of the opposition taking and distorting bits of information and creating an argument on which they want to argue a political point.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: This is obviously a serious matter, and to have it trivialised in the political way that the opposition continues to do is, I think, a discourtesy to—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! Minister.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: It shows discourtesy, I believe, to the people who work in the hospital.

Mr WILLIAMS: Point of order, Madam Speaker. Standing order 98 says that the minister must answer the substance of the question. The minister has not gone near answering the question; he is just entering into debate about the opposition.

The SPEAKER: Thank you; there is no point of order. If you ask a provocative question then the minister will respond.

Mr WILLIAMS: I contend that it is not provocative; it is a question that everyone in South Australia wants answered—

The SPEAKER: Order! Sit down.

Mr WILLIAMS: —and it is a question that this minister refuses to answer.

The SPEAKER: Sit down. Order!

The Hon. P.F. CONLON: I raise a point of order.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. P.F. CONLON: My point of order is: under what standing order does the deputy leader make his contention?

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! There were no points of order there. Minister.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: Thank you, Madam Speaker. Managing a hospital is obviously a very complex business and there are various parts of the hospital that you need to get right to make sure that the whole place works well. The emergency department, which is the front door for most, though not all, of the people who come into our hospitals, has to be managed in a particular way. We then need to move patients out of the emergency department into a ward, if they are going to go into a ward, or return them to their home if that is where they are ultimately going to end up. A whole range of processes have to work, so part of the reform process right across our health system has been to get this to work well.

Flinders has actually made some very good progress in terms of some of those elements. I do not think it has gone as far as it would want to go, and I do not believe that anyone in the hospital would say that it has gone as far as they want it to go. All the staff who work in the hospital have to be committed to the overall goals and the overall processes that have been agreed to by the executive; you cannot have individual elements of the hospital deciding to go outside and do things on an ad hoc basis. You have to have an overall set of polices that apply.

One of the reasons that I have asked for an independent review of this hospital is because, clearly, some of those elements are not working in a collaborative way, and there have been repeated examples brought to the attention of the media by the ambulance union about issues around the front entrance to the hospital. I haven't attributed blame to anybody in relation to this. I said, 'There is obviously an issue, and I want to get to the bottom of it.' My job as minister is to get to the bottom of it. I don't believe it is possible without having somebody from outside of our system to properly have a look at what is going on at the hospital, to get some advice for the people who work in the hospital, and to government generally, about making sure that we can make improvements.

All of the issues that the Flinders Medical Centre has to deal with about patient flow, about emergencies, about peaks in demand, are all of the same issues that apply at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the Lyell McEwin Hospital, and The Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Arguably, it is more difficult at some of those hospitals because of some of the circumstances that they are in. They all get managed without the contention between the ambulance service and the emergency department. That is why there is an issue about Flinders, and that is what we are trying to resolve. The politicisation of it and the point scoring—I understand why the opposition wants to do that—just does not indicate any way forward other than to have them make a lot of noise, trying to gain political attention for their own cause.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!