Health Review

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (14:03): Supplementary, sir: can the minister guarantee that no lives will be lost as a result of the decision to downgrade half of the emergency departments here in South Australia?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (14:03): What I can say is that we already have 500 more deaths in South Australia every year than in comparable states. That is a problem which needs to be fixed, and that is something which Transforming Health is seeking to correct. The simple fact is, one of the reasons we have more mortalities than interstate benchmarks is because of the way our health system's configured. It has grown organically over the last 80 years, with aged facilities that need to be replaced, the way we do rehabilitation and the fact that it's not incorporated into our major hospitals, and the way our emergency departments just do not work.

We have too many people going to the wrong emergency department who are not able to get the definitive treatment. We have stroke data which makes it quite clear that people are presenting after hours with strokes and are unnecessarily dying because we don't have senior clinicians on after hours, because we don't have the diagnostic services available. These are all the sorts of things we are trying to fix as part of Transforming Health, and I'm very confident that we'll be able to get that mortality rate down and we will have fewer—fewer—unnecessary deaths than we do at the moment.