Ambulance Ramping

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:38): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Is the minister aware of comments made in a recent SASMOA survey and, if so, does he agree with them? With your leave and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mrs HURN: In response to a question about delays to seeing patients in the waiting room, one respondent stated, and I quote:

SA Health prioritises patients who present via ambulance to those that walk in. This has worsened since the previous election and is political.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:38): Again, this is a matter that was taken seriously. There was an independent review that was ordered by very experienced and eminent clinicians to look into the allegations that Dr Pope raised. That report, provided to the government, made a number of conclusions that clinicians were very clear about in the media a number of weeks ago. They also provided the data in relation to the time in which people are to be seen through waiting rooms and the ambulance ramp which, obviously, I think very clearly said that the people who are waiting in the waiting room are waiting shorter than people on the ambulance ramp.

Consistently, there have been SA Health policies in place for a number of years, including under the previous government, essentially saying that for people who are of the same level of acuity people from the ambulance should be seen faster obviously because we want to make sure that those ambulances are able to respond to 000 cases in the community. That's a policy that the review finds should be kept with some changes made to it, but fundamentally that process should be what's maintained in the future, with appropriate clinical oversight.

Also, one of the key things that the report recommended was making sure that the people in the emergency department have the ability to see what's happening not just in the waiting room but also on the ambulance ramp and also in the community in terms of 000 responses, which are obviously very important as well and which this government is taking extremely seriously. Those recommendations have been accepted. The government is going to be working with industrial bodies and staff to implement those recommendations.

This does come back to the issues that we have across the health system as a whole in terms of capacity. There's no doubt that we need to improve capacity in the system so that people can be seen faster, whether they are coming through the waiting room, whether they are coming through the ambulance ramp or whether they are waiting for a 000 response for an ambulance.

A lot of that comes back to the issue of access block, as well as processing times and flow through hospitals as well. That's where the government's focus has been. That's what we believe needs to be addressed in terms of addressing these issues at the front door. Anything that we can do to improve patient experience at any level of the system we are very eager to do and that's why, having received these recommendations from these eminent clinicians, we have accepted them and we will be working to implement them.