EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH (Waite) (15:00): As a supplementary, given the minister's answer to that question, does he now acknowledge that overcrowding and ambulance ramping and diversions are occurring at other hospitals and that his statements to the house on 15 May, that the problems were restricted to Flinders Medical Centre, were wrong? Will he retract them and will he apologise to doctors, nurses, paramedics and patients?

The SPEAKER: That was not a supplementary: it was another question. Minister, you have just answered it.

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (15:01): I must be on another planet if that is not a clear implication from his question that I misled the house because there is ramping at other hospitals. That is the point that the member for Waite is making. I absolutely draw a distinction between the issue of ramping and the problems at Flinders Medical Centre, which involved ramping but involved the breakdown of communication between the Ambulance Service and its representatives through the union and the emergency department. That is the issue that I was talking about.

As to whether or not ramping occurs at other hospitals, all I can do is take advice, and the advice to me is that at the RAH it had not been occurring. It may have occurred from time to time at other hospitals. I have not said that it had not; that has never been something I have said. I would be surprised if it had not happened at other hospitals. If it happened at Flinders, presumably from time to time it happens at other hospitals, whether it is ramping in the technical sense as it is known in every other state, where ambos hold the patients in the ambulance or take them into the emergency department and look after them there.

It is not a policy that we want to see practised. It certainly might happen from time to time. It is not something that is standard practice, unlike in other states. It is standard practice in Western Australia, it is standard practice in Queensland, it is standard practice in New South Wales, and I believe it may well be in Victoria. It is part of the practice in those states.

It is not something that we want to see happen in our state, and what we are trying to do is make the transfer of patients out of the emergency department into the rest of the hospital to free up space so that matters can be dealt with, but from time to time there will be occasions when there are more patients trying to get into an emergency department than there are spaces, and somehow you have to manage that.

On-the-ground decision-making which has good collegiate management between the various sectors—the ambos, the emergency doctors and the like—is the best way of dealing with these things. The point I made in here and elsewhere which I do not resile from is that the issues at Flinders were different from the issues everywhere else because there had been a breakdown in those relationships.