Health Budget

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (14:54): Can the minister outline to the house what the total number of bed reductions will be—this is acute beds—if he achieves his goal to reduce our bed numbers down to the national average?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (14:54): I have not sat down and done it, but the current figure, from memory, is 2.6 per thousand population. The national average is 2.1, so I would like to see it. Of course, we will always probably need to have somewhat more acute beds than interstate because we have an older population, so I would not expect that we would get down to having the lowest number of any Australian state, but I would like to see it closer to the national average.

What I will always do is make sure that we have an adequate number of beds for the activity that we are getting. We will never reduce the beds and hope and expect the system to simply adapt, but I am confident, with the changes in Transforming Health, that as the system becomes more efficient, as we get better at discharging patients over the weekends so that we do not have these lengths of stay where the day of the week you present to the hospital can be a large determining factor in how long you stay in hospital, where we have rehabilitation better integrated into our big hospitals, we can get patients out of hospital far quicker. With all of these things I would certainly be confident that we would be able to get some reduction. I do not have a figure in mind, but I would like to see it a lot closer to the national average than it currently is.