Nurse Staffing Levels

Ms THOMPSON (Davenport) (14:25): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. How are the government's nursing and midwifery commitments being delivered and what improvements are being made to nursing care and nursing working conditions?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:25): Thank you very much to the member for Davenport. I thank her for her support of the improvements that are being made to address both the nursing care and the nursing working conditions across South Australia. One of the very key commitments that we made as a government at the election was to hire more nurses. We see nurses and midwives as critical components of our healthcare system and we have heard time and time again how they are significantly overworked in terms of the important work that they do.

We have a very ambitious program in terms of building and operating and opening more beds across the system that will necessitate, in addition, more nurses across the system as well. I am very happy to inform the member for Davenport and the house that we have been making tremendous progress on this already. While figures do bounce around from time to time, I am advised that we had hired, at the end of June since coming to government, at that stage already an additional 266 nurses, excluding the COVID nurses for testing centres and vaccination clinics, etc.

That goes a significant way to addressing that election commitment, but there is significantly more that we can do as well. We know that a lot of the commitments we made were for specific nursing areas where there were identified needs and some of those were in relation to childhood cancer care and also childhood mental health care, where we have committed additional nurses. I am advised that, in those areas, we have already hired 10 of those 12 additional kids' mental health and cancer nurses for those particular areas, so we have gone a long way to implementing that.

I have already informed the house previously of how we are hiring 10 additional palliative care nurses across South Australia with that recruitment process underway. We are also hiring four new Parkinson's nurse specialists, addressing a significant area of gap in helping people stay healthy in the community. We are also hiring three specialist nurses for epilepsy training, which will help to reduce pressure on our hospitals as well, and also a full-time nurse at Arthritis SA to support people living with arthritis and better manage their condition in the community.

Of course that is not all. We need to protect our nurses when they are at work. We have heard time and time again about the working conditions particularly at the Port Lincoln hospital, where nurses were being repeatedly assaulted and no action was being taken in relation to security. We have put in place an additional security guard 24 hours a the day in the Port Lincoln emergency department for the first time ever and that has been a very welcome protection for our nurses.

We are also working with the ANMF in terms of a security review and a 10-point plan for security to keep our nurses safe right across the system. We of course ended the practice of making nurses redundant. We have ended voluntary separations for frontline nurses across our healthcare system. We have recently addressed and voted for a new EB with our nurses across the system, which was supported by 78 per cent of the nursing and midwifery workforce.

We have started the work and established the working group that is working on bringing to this parliament in this term of government a piece of legislation that will enshrine in legislation the nurse to patient ratios so that for each patient there is the appropriate amount of nursing that is provided. We know that nurses are the backbone of our healthcare system. We need more nurses and they need to be supported to appropriately care for their patients.