MARGARET TOBIN CENTRE

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH (Waite) (14:39): My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Has he replied to a letter, signed by 15 doctors, sent to him on 21 May, which highlights their professional concerns regarding his plan to close acute mental health beds at the Margaret Tobin Centre, and what is his response to the substance of their concerns?

In the letter, the 15 doctors have expressed concerns about patient and clinical safety, increased demand on emergency departments, and what they describe as 'unacceptable risks to mental health consumers, public mental health staff in the region and the wider community'. In particular, the doctors state that the minister's decision on mental health acute bed closures 'will lead to increased risk of adverse outcomes, including completed suicides and harm to others through assault'.

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (14:40): I thank the member for Waite for his question. It is true, I received a letter two or three weeks ago from a group of psychiatrists who expressed concerns about the closure of some beds. I have to say that the letter was in fact from the doctors union. It is signed by the psychiatrists but it is, in fact, a union letter to me.

The union was, and is, conducting a campaign in opposition to the government's clear intention to close a number of acute mental health beds. This is an intention which we have put before the public way back in 2007 as part of the Stepping Up report. I have repeated on countless occasions that it was happening. I have made ministerial statements in this place that it was happening and it is the policy of this government, which has been consistent over the past five or six years.

The reason we are going through this process of closing some acute mental health beds is that the Stepping Up plan, which, as I understood, had strong support from the mental health clinical staff, said that we had too many acute mental health beds and too few non-acute mental health places in South Australia and, as a consequence, when people had mental illness in our state, they had only one place they could go, and that was to an acute mental health bed.

There were not enough services to help people in the preliminary stages, nor were there enough services to help people when they were coming out of acute care. So the government embarked on a plan based on Commissioner Cappo's report, called Stepping Up, which said that we should put some of the resources from our acute beds into our non-acute sector, and that is what we have been working on for some years.

As a result of that Stepping Up process, we now have 92 extra beds since 2007. So there will be more places for mental health patients. We will still have, I am told, more mental health beds per capita in our state than all of the other states, so we will be well above the national benchmark for mental health beds. That is the summary of what we are doing.

We did not close the beds down at the beginning of this reform process; we waited until the extra capacity had been built before we undertook the closing of beds. This is something that we highlighted. We have not hidden it; we have made it clear. The doctors union is campaigning against this. They are threatening to take industrial action. They took it to the Industrial Relations Commission. The Industrial Relations Commission found against them and has given us the go-ahead to close beds down. The beds will close.

I reject the arguments that have been put. I am getting a detailed response to the letter from the doctors. They asked to meet with me and I, of course, will meet with them. I always meet with members of the medical fraternity who seek to meet with me. I will have a respectful conversation but, on this point, we will have to respectfully disagree.