Health Services, Southern Suburbs

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:57): I rise today to talk about health services in my electorate and in the southern suburbs of Adelaide and some of the threats to services in the area. I was lucky enough to visit of some of the health services and hospitals in the last week before parliament sat. In particular, I visited the Aldinga GP Plus clinic, the Noarlunga Hospital and the Flinders Medical Centre. It was a good opportunity to meet some of the fantastic doctors and nurses who provide such great care for our community.

I was very impressed at the Aldinga GP Plus clinic, firstly at how busy the waiting room was first thing in the morning. There are clearly a lot of services being offered there. After-hours GP services are offered from the clinic, which is very popular in Aldinga. They started off there when there were very few GP services in the area. There are now more available, which is fantastic, but those after-hour services are there for the community as well. There is a whole range of other specialists who come to visit and use the facilities, such as paediatricians and allied health services, including dieticians. It was good to meet with Nicole Keller and Lynda Hamilton.

I was then lucky enough to visit Noarlunga Hospital with the member for Reynell. We met with Joe MacDonald and Kathy Egel. It is an increasingly busy hospital at Noarlunga, in the surgery and medical wards and the emergency department. It services a large area of the state, stretching from the southern suburbs around Noarlunga all the way down to the Fleurieu. People come to Noarlunga Hospital for treatment.

What really struck me there was that when we visited the medical ward, which is very busy this time of year, there were 15 patients who were ready to leave. They had had their treatment and were ready to be discharged into appropriate care, whether that be aged care or rehabilitation services. But they were waiting at the hospital before leaving to go to those services. Those beds were being used by patients who could otherwise have been cared for in the aged-care or rehabilitation sectors.

I think that really highlighted for me that a hospital system is not just confined to what is within the boundaries of those hospitals but are really connected to the other services, particularly those run by the commonwealth, either in primary health care or aged care, and that, to get an efficient, affordable hospital system, we need investments in those other parts of the health system too.

We then visited Flinders Medical Centre, and we were given a tour by Belinda Moyes, the chief executive there. It was great to see the new emergency department, which is a great redevelopment which has happened in recent years. It has much better facilities for patients and for medical and nursing staff, as well as its having a great new paediatric emergency department, which is a separate unit for children and which is appropriately established for children's needs. That has not been in place before and, given the huge number of children who visit Flinders Medical Centre for emergency visits, it is well needed. In fact, Flinders is now the busiest emergency department in Australia, and it has a huge number of patients visiting every year, particularly in this winter period.

We also visited the intensive care unit, which is also very large and which handles a number of the very complex cases, and we saw the new birthing unit which this government has invested in, which provides very modern facilities for mothers having their babies.

Unfortunately, there are a whole range of cuts that are threatening the public hospitals in this state, particularly in the southern suburbs of Adelaide. As we know, the federal government has cut $50 billion worth of health funding over the next 10 years, and that is because they have removed the fifty-fifty growth agreement that was in place between the commonwealth and the states, so that the commonwealth would fund 50 per cent of the growth in health expenditure, which, as we know, continues to go up and up and up.

That equals $5.5 billion worth of funding for South Australia over those 10 years, which is a huge impact upon the hospitals in this state, and the hospitals in my area will not be immune from those cuts should they go ahead. There is also the $7 co-charge, which will increase the number of people visiting emergency departments, and that is not just on GP visits but on blood tests, diagnostic tests and a whole range of other areas.

Time expired.