Health Review

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (14:41): My question is again to the Minister for Health. Can the minister tell us: why did the minister ignore the submission of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine that stated our emergency departments could not cope with the proposed changes?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (14:41): I think the member for Morphett is somewhat verballing the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, or the South Australian branch of it, because it's not quite what they have said. They have made quite clear that, of course, if you just closed emergency departments down and expected all the patients that currently go to those emergency departments to go to one of the three, of course they wouldn't be able to cope, but no-one is suggesting that happen, apart from the opposition of course, but certainly that is not coming from me or anyone else in health.

We are talking about relatively small numbers of patients. As I talked about with the Noarlunga Hospital, it is a very, very small increase in presentations, about 7 per cent of the total presentations that currently go to Noarlunga. As I said, the director of the Southern Adelaide Local Health Network emergency, Professor Alan O'Connor, estimated about six ambulances a day. With regard to the Modbury Hospital, a half of 1 per cent of presentations that go currently to the Modbury emergency department would need to go straight to the Lyell McEwin or the Royal Adelaide Hospital. There are good reasons to do this, very, very good reasons to do this, and that is because we have a particular problem in our emergency departments with after-hours cover by senior clinicians and the services around those clinicians.

We don't have, at all of our sites, 24-hour access to medical imaging or various diagnostic services. We don't have senior clinicians on after midnight across all of our sites. We need to make sure that at least at a certain number of our emergency departments they do have appropriate access 24/7 to senior clinicians and to medical imaging and the other diagnostic services so that people don't have their treatment delayed, which is currently what happens. That's why, in something like presentations such as stroke, we have completely unacceptable outcomes. As Minister for Health, I can't stand by and allow us to continue to have a system where we have three times the number of people dying from stroke between midnight and 8am than during other times of the day. I'm putting forward a plan to change it to make our system work better, so that we get more consistency of care. What do we get from the opposition? Nothing but harping and grumbling and scaremongering.

The SPEAKER: The minister is not responsible for the opposition. The member for Newland.

Dr McFETRIDGE: Supplementary, Mr Speaker?

The SPEAKER: No, we will come back to you. Member for Newland.