Emergency Departments

Ms DIGANCE (Elder) (14:47): My question is to the Minister for Health. Minister, what has the response been to the government's recently launched campaign to reduce violence and aggression in hospital emergency departments?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (14:47): I thank the member for Elder for her question and her interest. Earlier this month, I launched SA Health's most recent major public awareness campaign, which aims to reduce violence and aggression towards hospital staff in emergency departments. Nurses, doctors and other staff in our hospitals do an outstanding job providing the highest quality care to our community. Sadly, these same staff frequently face situations of violence and aggression from the very people they are there to look after.

The campaign, titled 'Waiting is not an emergency', is running at the moment and will run to June 2017 and is headlined by a 30-second fictitious video showing aggression in an ED through the lens of a security camera. In a busy ED, lives depend on those most in need receiving medical attention first. This can result in people with less critical conditions waiting longer, which can of course be frustrating. However, resorting to the kind of idiotic behaviour that's depicted in the video is totally unacceptable and doesn't help anyone.

We know these public awareness campaigns are effective in getting the message across. Our campaign under the 'Taking care of challenging behaviour' strategy—the award-winning 'Keep your hands off our ambos' campaign—was incredibly successful and so far has resulted in a 13 per cent reduction in such incidents. Similarly, the 'Emergency departments are for emergencies' campaign, which ran over winter in 2015 and 2016, resulted in significantly fewer people presenting to EDs with relatively minor medical complaints.

Since our most recent campaign was launched, there has been an overwhelming response on social media. In the 24 hours following its launch, the video was viewed over 3.5 million times. To date, the video has been viewed more than 6.5 million times with 600,000 of those views by people in South Australia. Over 216,000 people have liked the video, and it has been shared more than 60,000 times.

We are confident that the campaign will be as successful as previous efforts, if not more so, and that people will give greater respect to our hardworking staff. I was disappointed with the opposition spokesperson, the Hon. Michelle Lensink, who was quoted as saying:

I just think the campaign's a really soft approach. I'd love to see, you know, some report that the government's written that says that this is going to be some answer to the problem.

If the honourable member doesn't regret this remark, she doesn't understand the impact that 6½ million views on social media is likely to have. She also couldn't have taken the trouble even to read the media release that was put out when this campaign was launched because, if she did, she would have been aware of SA Health's challenging behaviour strategy. The strategy is available on SA Health's website and describes in some detail how we are working to tackle this problem.

As well as the public awareness campaign, we are trialling measures in the Lyell McEwin Hospital ED to create an environment where people will be less likely to become frustrated to the point that they lash out at staff. For example, a screen has been installed that details in real-time how many people are currently in the ED and the anticipated wait to be treated.

The challenging behaviour strategy has also developed a training course and toolkit to support SA Health staff to identify challenging behaviour, to prevent it and, if necessary, respond when it occurs. Violence and aggression against healthcare workers in any setting is completely unacceptable, and the government is working to protect our staff from this dangerous and destructive behaviour.