COUNTRY HOSPITALS

Mr BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:31): I rise today to update the house on some of the recent travels I have undertaken as parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Health and Ageing. As I have mentioned in this house before, it has been a great honour for me to be able to get around the state to almost 50 country hospitals so far in the past year, to go on tours of the hospitals and talk to local people and staff at those hospitals and management to find out what it is that is important and what we can improve, but also to bring them up to date with where we are as a state, how our health system is operating and how important the work that they are doing is in fitting into the wider picture.

There are some great stats, as the Minister for Health mentioned today. We keep picking up very good commendations from national surveys that are undertaken that measure various aspects of our health system. In terms of emergency department waiting times and elective surgery waiting times, we are leading the nation, which is great to see. In country areas, the hospitals in our regions are doing particularly well, so it is great to get out there and talk to people and thank them.

Recently, back in August, I was up in the Riverland and came down through the Mallee, then did Mount Pleasant and Gumeracha and then went up to Woomera and Roxby Downs. In September, I spent some time at Murray Bridge and Mannum. It was great to get down to Murray Bridge. They have some new imaging equipment down there which is really fantastic. The staff were so enthusiastic and there are so many things that they can do now at Murray Bridge so they no longer have to send patients into the metropolitan area for tests and so on, and we are finding that more and more as we get out throughout the state.

Country people are now getting access to telemedicine, so they can consult with a specialist on the other end of a line. They just walk into the hospital or local surgery and appear in front of the camera and there will be a specialist or doctor waiting at the other end of that. So, someone in Ceduna can present their wound to them, have that wound checked and it is all over in 15 minutes.

Without telemedicine, that same person might have had to spend at least the whole day, possibly a day and a half, out of their community. They would have had to organise babysitters or people to pick up their kids from school perhaps, so it is a real inconvenience, not just for the individual but also for the community that loses a person for a day for a procedure that can take just 15 minutes. We are seeing a lot of that.

Murray Bridge obviously serves a very wide area of the Mallee and the northern Coorong area, and patients can go there rather than all the way into Adelaide. We are also seeing, with the increase in dialysis and chemotherapy services that are available in country hospitals, that we are making it a lot easier for people. We are seeing slower growth in presentations to metropolitan hospitals and an increase in presentations to country hospitals, and that is exactly what we want to see. We want to see that when people need to have medical procedures, or when they need to see specialists, they can do that as close to home as possible.

I also visited Mannum District Hospital on the same day that I went to Murray Bridge, and it was terrific. I must say to anyone who is driving through Mannum to look out for the hospital auxiliary shop in the main street; it is terrific. They have great homemade sauces and relishes. I need to make a return trip because we have run out, despite stocking up on the day—they are just sensational sauces and relishes. The money goes to the auxiliary, which then funds lots of upgrades to rooms and so on in the local Mannum District Hospital, where everyone is doing a terrific job.

Last week, I went to Port Lincoln and Cummins. Port Lincoln is one of our four country general hospitals. We are spending about $30 million on each of these hospitals to upgrade them and to put more and more services and more and more equipment in the hospitals. It was good to see the plans, which will be finalised soon and which will come back to the government for approval. From Port Lincoln I then went on to Cummins, where we opened an accident and emergency service area, which received $570,000 from the state government. I also got to open the medical centre upgrade, which is providing great services to the people of Cummins.

I would really like to thank the local member, Peter Treloar, who was born in the Cummins Hospital, for a terrific job. I would like to thank Trish Clarke, who is the Director of Nursing at Cummins Hospital and who is about to retire. Thank you for all your great work.