Grievance Debate

FLINDERS MEDICAL CENTRE

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH (Waite) (15:13): It has been an unfortunate week in health, but I want to do one thing: I want to congratulate the Minister for Health and Ageing for admitting today that he and his government got it miserably wrong on the Keith hospital. I think he has come in here today and made the right announcement, which is that the government is going to reinstate funding to the Keith hospital to the tune of $350,000 in a one-off grant. We know why—because they made an ill-considered, sad decision to cut funding to this hospital, and it blew up in their face. To use a Labor analogy, they had a hand grenade in their face, they let their finger go off, and it blew up right between their eyes.

You cannot take funding away from a district hospital like Keith and expect people to survive, and we have seen a tragic example of that in recent weeks. What they must now do is provide some long-term certainty to the Keith hospital. The minister has told the house today what I knew quite clearly when I went down there when I first became the shadow and spoke to the board, doctors and nurses, and that is that they cannot attract a GP service or GPs to Keith because there is no long-term future at the hospital. They will need something beyond a 12-month promise of one-off funding. That is his challenge leading into the next election.

However, it does not end there, because we have had tragic news this week of the failure of the emergency department at Flinders hospital. Of course, today's news is that doctors, through the SA Salaried Medical Officers Association, and nurses, through the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, are in the Industrial Commission taking industrial action against the minister to get a delay on the closure of 10 mental health beds at the Tobin centre at Flinders, partly because of the pressure it will put upon the emergency department at Flinders.

The minister tells us everything is fine: he just failed to mention that the doctors and the nurses who run our health system do not agree with him. I am sorry, minister: the opposition does not agree with you, the doctors and nurses do not agree with you, and the patients that use our hospitals do not agree with you. You have got it wrong on closing these 10 acute beds and you have got it wrong on the way the emergency department is failing to function at Flinders. I am calling today for the minister not to close those 10 beds, at least until he has completed his own inquiry into the emergency department at Flinders. It may very well recommend that we need these 10 beds to remain open.

Of course, we then have the very sad circumstances of the resignation of Dr Di King at Flinders as a consequence of ramping, the cabbing up of ambulances at the Flinders emergency department. Dr King, as the house has heard, has had to pronounce people dead where the Coroner has found that they were left unattended in her emergency department on barouches in corridors and triage areas, without proper records being kept and without the right support. She has clearly said, 'Never again on my watch,' and she has maintained a standard in her emergency department that has made sure that people's lives are not put at risk.

That is not good enough for the minister for health. Clearly, Dr King, presumably at his instigation or that of an official somewhere within SA Health, was told, 'Guarantee there would be no ramping.' It was immoral, in her words, for her to give that guarantee and she has refused to do so. She has gone. What are the standards, or the lack of standards, now? There is no guarantee that patients will be admitted into the hospital and no guarantee that EDs will be appropriately resourced, but EDs are being told, 'Accept the patients, no matter what.' This is the scapegoating and the pressure that is being put on doctors and nurses by this government as we speak. It has been a week of shame.

I could talk about the fact that the minister is trying to sell car parks at the Women's and Children's Hospital that he does not own and I could talk about the many other problems in the health system, but I think this week alone has given us a demonstration that the minister, in the words of the doctors and nurses, is not consulting with them, he is not talking to the ambulance officers, he is blaming doctors when things go wrong, not himself, and he has championed a culture of denying responsibility. It is everybody else's fault but his.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Hon. M.J. Wright): The member's time has expired.

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH: I am here to tell members that it is his fault. It is his fault, and he must fix it.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Hon. M.J. Wright): Order! The member for Mitchell.