Grievance Debate

Health Services

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:03): South Australians deserve and expect high-quality public healthcare services. Year after year, we had the Liberal Party of South Australia say that they were going to fix everything in the public health system. They said that things would be a nirvana under their leadership.

Now we are almost two years into their running our public health system and we have the evidence of what is going on: they are running our public hospitals into the ground. We have seen the latest stats on what is happening with ambulance ramping in the state, and it is nothing short of disastrous. It is the worst ambulance ramping we have ever had in the history of this state.

When they took office, there were about 1,000 hours per month when ambulances were delayed at hospitals. Certainly, it was not good enough and needed to be improved; however, what has happened since then is that it has only gone up and up and up and the delays and pain for patients have got worse and worse and worse, to the point where the last month of data, for August, showed over 2,000 hours when ambulances with patients were stuck outside our public hospitals.

These are patients who need to be in the public hospital, receiving care from doctors, from nurses, but were outside. Not only does it affect those patients; it also affects all the other patients in the community who are waiting for an ambulance to arrive but they are all stuck with patients at Flinders, Lyell McEwin, RAH, QEH, so they cannot respond to the other emergencies happening in the community. The waiting times at our emergency departments are getting worse, but also the waiting times in our communities are getting much worse.

In the last couple of weeks, we have had some awful examples of what this can mean. Last week, we had reported a horrible death of a woman at Flinders Medical Centre who died while being on the ramp for over an hour at that hospital. She should have been inside that hospital. She should have been receiving the full gamut of treatment from doctors and nurses at our second largest hospital in the state. Unfortunately, she was stuck on the ramp and lost her pulse while on the ramp and died shortly afterwards.

As the Premier himself said, that is not acceptable; however, that is going to continue to happen, sadly, if this ramping crisis continues. We have seen more examples this week, when we had another case reported of a man who was at Flinders Medical Centre as well, ramped for 2½ hours, who decided to leave the hospital rather than continue to be ramped there and continue to be in indignity while waiting at that hospital. When we start seeing people with difficult conditions leaving our hospitals, that is only going to increase the risk for them.

We have also seen the death of an ambulance volunteer. Down on the South Coast, an ambulance volunteer, somebody in his 30s who gave his time to help the community, had a heart attack. His family called an ambulance, and even though of course he gave his time to the Ambulance Service an ambulance did not arrive in time for him, and he died, unfortunately, as well. This is happening time and time again.

A few weeks ago, we saw at the Lyell McEwin Hospital a case of a very significant infection that a patient had there. They needed to go to the ICU, and they needed to have an operation immediately to address that infection, but the ICU was full. The hospital was completely full; they were stuck in a resus room in the emergency department rather than going to the ICU, rather than getting that emergency operation they needed, which potentially could have saved their life. We were contacted, and the media was contacted, by a whistleblower in the hospital raising concerns that this is happening time and time again and that patients are suffering for it.

This, of course, comes after what we heard earlier this year when a cluster of nine deaths occurred at the end of last year. That was when ramping was not as bad as it is now. I worry: what is going to be happening this winter, this peak period that is happening at the moment, when ramping is the worst it has ever been in this state? How many other patients are we going to be hearing about in months' time? What is the government's response to this? 'We are going to cut staff.' The Premier has broken his promise not to cut doctors and nurses. He is cutting doctors and nurses from our hospitals. There are not idle doctors and nurses sitting in our hospitals.

They are going to save money by cutting doctors and nurses, but ultimately it will be patients who are paying the price with longer waiting times. They have put corporate liquidators in charge of our hospitals, they are hiking ambulance fees, but they are not actually putting more money into our Ambulance Service. They have closed beds at some of our major hospitals, they are outsourcing work to private hospitals and they have delayed and downgraded an upgrade to the Lyell McEwin Hospital. All of this is a sign of what downgrading is happening under their health system, and patients are paying the price.