Country Health Services

Mr GRIFFITHS (Goyder) (15:15): Supplementary, sir: I understand that the 1 April date originally set for the removal of the services has now been removed. Is there an indication of when the community consultation will start, what form it will take and if another date has been set when that is?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (15:15): No other date has been set, but we do have an issue with our ability to continue to provide that service at that hospital revolving around the availability of that doctor continuing to provide the service. That is going to come to a head at some stage, but I certainly hope we can have this issue resolved.

Providing any service at any of our hospitals—country or metropolitan—revolves around two critical issues; one is the availability of clinicians who have the requisite skills to be able to provide that service which you can't do if you don't have them and the second is that you are able to do it in sufficient numbers, whatever the procedure might be, so as to meet the various clinical guidelines about the requisite number for a particular service to be safe. I think they are two pretty critical issues that you can't get around at Yorketown Hospital.

The bottom line for me is, unless I can be reassured that a service is safe in one of our country hospitals, we won't be doing it because I won't be having the Coroner coming after me saying that I intervened and insisted that a service continue to be provided when the clinical advice I had was that it couldn't be done in sufficient numbers to be safe, but we will continue to work with the Yorketown community and see if we can find a solution to this issue.