Health Services

Mr ELLIS (Narungga) (14:45): My question is to the minister representing the Minister for Health. Can the minister please update the house on how the Marshall Liberal government is delivering better health services for South Australians?

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Minister for Education) (14:46): I thank the member for Narungga for his question. When I was in the member for Narungga's electorate just last week, we were passing the Kadina hospital and talking about a number of these issues. While I'm on that opportunity, I will pay tribute to Dr John Flett, who passed away in the last couple of weeks, who was integral to building that hospital and supporting health services on Yorke Peninsula. Dr Flett was South Australia's nominee for Australian of the Year two years running in the 2000s, and I think it is appropriate at this time to mark his passing and the extraordinary contribution he made to health services in South Australia, particularly on Yorke Peninsula.

The Marshall Liberal government was elected with a commitment to deliver better health services for the people of South Australia. We have always made clear that there is not going to be a quick fix for the health system that we encountered upon coming to office. The disastrous mismanagement in so many areas will take time to fix, but we have worked every day. The Minister for Health in particular has worked diligently every day to address the challenges facing that system.

In relation to the Repat, we stopped the sell-off of the site. Fifty beds have been secured on the site that were to be washed away. A new 78-bed dementia-care facility will be built as part of the Oakden response statewide model of care, co-located with an 18-bed acute ward, and $110 million has been committed to reactivate the Repat. We have restored 24/7 cardiac services at The QEH. We have invested $4 million to upgrade the cardiac cath labs and begun the stage 3 redevelopment.

At Modbury, we have returned 72-hour surgery. We have established an extended emergency care unit. We will deliver a four-bed HDU, and we are delivering a $92 million capital upgrade for the hospital. At Noarlunga, we have delivered the 12-bed acute medical unit. We are investing a further $86 million in a very important project in the Southern Health Expansion Plan, a series of service moves that will boost health services in southern Adelaide by increasing emergency treatment spaces at Flinders Medical Centre by an additional 30 spaces, creating a new state-of-the-art 12-bed acute facility for people with dementia and complex care needs at the Repat, enhancing acute capacity in Noarlunga Hospital and increasing medical cover in the ED.

About 4,100 South Australians were waiting for a colonoscopy beyond recommended clinical time frames in August 2018. We committed $45 million to cutting overdue elective surgery and colonoscopies given this extraordinary waiting list balloon that we were confronting. It was completely unacceptable. In the past five months, the number of people referred for colonoscopy for the first time and who were on the overdue waiting list has dropped from that 4,100 to 1,970 as of 15 August 2019 and to 1,017 as of 31 January this year, a 75 per cent reduction from the government starting this support.

We have halved the number of South Australians overdue for elective surgery since the election in March 2018, and since we activated stand-by beds in the Central Adelaide Local Health Network last October transfer of care figures for ambulances has decreased. This is so important at the moment because these improvements have put us in a better position to respond to the challenges of COVID-19. By cutting the overdue elective surgery and colonoscopy lists, by having beds ready on stand-by, our hospitals have the capacity to deal with a potential surge from COVID-19 if that proves to be the case.

We have seen today that the Royal Adelaide Hospital has opened a clinic, something it might not have been able to do if it was operating at full capacity. The Marshall Liberal government is delivering better health services for the people of South Australia and in doing so is making sure that the state is prepared as best it can be for COVID-19. We will continue to work every day to support improved services for all South Australians.