Health Review

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (16:52): Yes. The minister has told us about the very small number of patients who won't be treated at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, but can he tell us about what services will be removed from The Queen Elizabeth Hospital? Why is it that these people won't be able to be treated there? Is it because there won't be the same surgeons, doctors, nurses or ICU arrangement at that hospital? What time frame, also, will those services be removed?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (16:52): Well, the detail of these things is in the proposals paper that's been released, and I think I am more than happy to provide a personal briefing to the Leader of the Opposition to go through all of the detail. But yes, in principle, the highest acuity hospital in the state, as it currently is, will be the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and The Queen Elizabeth Hospital will perform services in the more subacute areas of care.

One of the things which we want to do is improve our elective surgery rates. At the moment, 25 per cent of patients who schedule for elective surgery have their surgery cancelled, and that's just not good enough. How can we resolve that? The answer, in the proposals paper, is by creating sites that specialise in elective surgery, of which The Queen Elizabeth Hospital will be one, to ensure that it is far less frequent than happens at the moment that patients are having their elective surgery cancelled.

So, it will also be making a significant additional investment into the rehab facilities at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, all of which the opposition would describe as a 'downgrade'. They don't think rehabilitation is very important, but rehabilitation—

Mr GARDNER: 98: clearly, it's debating.

The SPEAKER: I will listen carefully to ensure that the Minister for Health does not debate the answer.

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING: Rehabilitation is a very, very important component of our health system because it's the work that's done by our rehabilitation clinicians that gets people out of hospital and back home more quickly. At the moment, we do not do it as well as we could, not through any fault of the clinicians, but simply because the rehabilitation is not done in the same location as where the patients are. The patients have to essentially recover before their rehabilitation can begin, and that means they spend longer in hospital, it takes a longer time for them to rehabilitate, and it takes a longer time for them to get home. This is something we need to fix, and that is why we want rehabilitation facilities co-located at our big hospital sites, such as The Queen Elizabeth Hospital.