Ambulance Ramping

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (15:09): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Is it the government's top priority to fix ramping? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mrs HURN: During the recent election campaign, an advertisement authorised by the Australian Labor Party said, 'Vote Labor like your life depends on it', offering a sort of urgency to the promise to fix ramping.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The Treasurer is called to order and the member for Schubert is reminded that, in introducing material, it must be facts and not argument and there was, in the tail of the material introduced, a degree of argument.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:10): I am very happy to take this question and confirm that fixing the ramping crisis is this government's number one priority. The critical issue that we raised time and time again and was ignored but, more importantly than us, that our frontline healthcare workers were raising and were being gaslit day after day by the previous government saying, 'Everything is fine, nothing to worry about, no problem here,' is that those delays in the hospital system—

Mrs Hurn: That's your approach now.

The SPEAKER: Order, member for Schubert!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: —were leading to people getting stuck on the ramp and ultimately leading to people waiting longer to get an ambulance when they need it. What we saw recently—what we saw last week come out—was the federal Productivity Commission's report on government services. Essentially, the last year of the previous government showed over the course of the four years what they had the chance to do while they were in office—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! Minister, please be seated.

Mr Patterson interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Morphett knows better. The member for Schubert is becoming closely familiar with 137A. She will depart for the remainder of question time. She has been given fair warning.

The honourable member for Schubert having withdrawn from the chamber:

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: What we saw was those ambulance response times continuing to get worse and worse. We went from 19 minutes four years ago on the 90^th percentile for metropolitan Adelaide up to 71 minutes at the end of the four years of the Marshall government. That is the key concern, and that is why we are so heavily focused and invested in addressing this issue.

As the Premier said, it's very welcoming and encouraging that we did see a significant reduction in January, but we know that we have a long way to go to turn around the upward trajectory over the past five years in terms of transfer of care and ramping hours. What we need to do is have that capacity in the system to make sure, ultimately, that we can get people through the emergency department into those inpatient beds without being stuck in the emergency department, which means that the next ambulance coming on the ramp isn't able to take that patient inside the hospital. That is what all of our plans are focused on.

Thanks to the Premier and to the Treasurer in the last state budget we had a massive investment of $2.4 billion into our healthcare system in terms of more doctors and nurses but, importantly, more hospital beds, because we really haven't seen that number of hospital beds increase by any significant margin over the past four or five years. We need to increase those numbers of beds because we have an increasing aging population, because we have increasing demand on our health services, and because we have seen the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which really significantly hit our hospitals last year more than it had in the previous two years where our borders had been closed, and we didn't have any room for margin to spare because we didn't have the bed capacity to be able to open it.

One of the first things the Premier and I did was sit down with Health as soon as we took office and said, 'We need to open up every single bed that we have.' They did that, but we still didn't have enough beds to be able to do it. So we are investing in more beds. If you look at even some of our announcements recently, we are even increasing the beds on top of what we had committed to do at the election, for instance at Flinders Medical Centre. At the election, part of our plan was to open 24 more beds at that hospital. We now have a budgeted plan, together with an Albanese government, to increase the number of beds there by 136 extra beds, at Flinders Medical Centre. In addition to that, 24 more beds at the Repat, and, in addition to that, we have now doubled our announcement in terms of Noarlunga Hospital, to put another 48 beds into Noarlunga Hospital.

Mr Tarzia interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Hartley is warned.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: So that's increasing the capacity of Noarlunga Hospital by 50 per cent of the inpatient wards; 48 more beds at Lyell McEwin Hospital; 72 more beds at Modbury Hospital. We know that that capacity is needed so that we can get people through the emergency department and deal with the situation.