Question Time

Ambulance Ramping

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (14:40): My question is to the Premier. What does the Premier say to Mel, an ambulance volunteer of more than 10 years, who spoke on the steps of parliament just an hour ago, whose 34-year-old brother died of cardiac arrest waiting for an ambulance? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr PICTON: Mel and her brother, Jason, were ambulance volunteers for 10 years. One night in 2019 Jason went into cardiac arrest at their family home in Goolwa. Mel's parents had to perform CPR on their son for 25 minutes before paramedics could arrive on the scene—too late to save Jason's life. That evening, the Goolwa and Victor Harbor ambulances were ramped in Adelaide hospitals.

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:41): First of all, I thank the member for Kaurna for raising this important issue with us. Obviously, this is an unacceptable situation and we express our apology to Mel and to her family. There was a very high level of ramping in 2019. I note that there had been by 2020 a significant reduction with some improvement programs—about a 20 per cent reduction in 2020. But for all the reasons that we have already canvassed today, there has been a significant increase since that time.

As I said, the government finds this unacceptable. I wish there was some way that we could immediately solve all of these problems, but what I have tried to do today is to place on the record all of the improvements that we have made in this area to try to reduce the likelihood of this ever occurring again. Some of those areas are increased personnel, some of it is to do with the expansion of nine emergency departments in South Australia, some of it is to do with patient flow through our hospitals so that we get patients into emergency departments and out of emergency departments as quickly as possible.

On 1 January last year, sir, you would be aware that we established Wellbeing SA, which was designed specifically to, if you like, have a more preventative approach to health here in South Australia so that we can keep people healthy and out of our emergency departments, and that is already having some good results.

We have significantly recently announced a massive expansion of our out-of-hospital care programs, which is again taking people who are in our hospital, taking a bed in an important teaching hospital in South Australia, and putting them back into their home where they prefer to be. It does incur a cost to the taxpayers because often it requires some additional services in their home and sometimes physical changes to their home, but this is far preferable to them taking up that bed and also having worse outcomes for them.

One of the other things that we have invested in, of course, is the Priority Care Centres. I have just recently received some statistics that show that the Priority Care Centres have seen 15,935 patients to the week ending 14 November this year. These are patients, nearly 16,000, who would have ended up in our hospital system in South Australia if we didn't establish the new protocols under the Priority Care Centres in South Australia.

This has been successful. It was first introduced in 2019, we ramped it up in 2020 and we will continue to ramp it up. There is much more work to be done. I know that each chief executive of the local health networks in South Australia, particularly those in metropolitan Adelaide, has an acute focus on everything that they can do at the moment to make sure that they can get that patient flow through.

But they are being very significantly aided by the government, which has put more than $120 million out of session, if you like—so not within the existing budget for SA Health but a separate decision from the Budget Cabinet Committee—to apply this money immediately so that we can further flex up the capacity of our hospital system in South Australia. We want to make sure that we have the very best health system in Australia, and that means that we need to have the adequate resources in place—whether they be beds, whether they be personnel, whether they be models of care—and that's precisely what we have been doing since coming into government.