Ambulance Ramping

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:40): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Is the government walking away from its election commitment to fix ramping? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mrs HURN:The Advertiser reported today: 'The state government says it never committed to reducing ramping hours, despite its election pledge to fix the ramping crisis.'

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:41): As the Premier has already outlined, we are saying exactly the same thing now as we said before the election. Before the election, the Premier was asked repeatedly: what does 'fixing the ramping crisis' mean? Repeatedly, on radio and at press conferences, even at the press debate with all the media encircled and all the cameras there, he very clearly outlined that 'fixing the ramping crisis' means reducing ramping so that we can improve and get ambulance response times back to where they were in 2018, before the member for Dunstan was elected as the Premier.

What we saw was, over that time, ambulance response times getting worse and worse to become the worst in the nation, which was—

Mrs Hurn: Why have you just started talking about response times?

The SPEAKER: The member for Schubert is on a final warning.

The Hon. P.B. Malinauskas: We always have.

The SPEAKER: The Premier is called to order.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The Premier is warned. Member for Schubert, you are on a final warning, and both you and the Premier are warned.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: We have been very clear and said exactly the same thing then as we are saying now. I think the community understands that the risk of ramping is that it means that ambulances are not responding on time in the community. While we have seen some improvement—which is very welcome and I think to be applauded, the work that has gone into that improvement in terms of ambulance response times—there is a significant amount of work to do to get ramping down so we can get response times up.

That is what we are committed to do. It is not just one thing that needs to happen: it is hundreds of things that need to happen right across the system to make sure that people can get out of the emergency department and into the beds they need to get off the ramp, and ultimately the ambulances can get back out into the community to respond to those 000 cases. It is a plan that goes end to end right across the health system to do that, and we were very clear that it is going to take four years to be able to implement that plan. We have to build new hospital beds.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: We have to build new infrastructure, and we have said it time and time again. Those opposite, when they were in government, criticised us at the time, and the Premier has referred to those tweets that were put out at the time saying that we should have been going further in our comments and commitments. We were very clear in terms of what our commitments were doing. It was about getting those ambulances out into the community so that they can respond to people in critical need on time. We had a situation where priority 2 ambulance response times—

Ms Pratt interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order, member for Frome!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: Ambulance response times went from about 85 per cent back in 2018 for priority 2, lights-and-sirens cases—

The Hon. J.A.W. Gardner interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Member for Morialta!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: —down to 36 per cent in January last year. It meant that one in three times that somebody called for a lights-and-sirens priority 2 case, the ambulance rocked up on time. We have that back up to over one in two, but there is still a long way to go to get back to that 85 per cent mark that we were at back in 2018. We are committed to doing it, and we have to reduce ramping to ensure that we can do that.

Our hospitals are still under significant pressure. We have opened up every hospital bed that we can in the system, but we need to build more, and we are building more, to make sure that there is the capacity to get people through the emergency department, to get those ambulances responding back out into the community.