Question Time

SA Health Staff

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS (Black—Leader of the Opposition) (14:12): My question is to the Premier. Is the government considering workforce incentives to attract and retain GPs and nurses leading into the state budget and, if not, why not?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:12): Thank you very much, sir, for the question from the Leader of the Opposition. The truth is that we are providing incentives for the workforce across SA Health. Already we have been very successful in terms of attraction and retention of staff. In our first year in office we increased the staff FTE, across our clinicians, of 550 extra staff, full-time equivalents, above attrition, and that breaks down to nurses, doctors, allied health professionals and ambulance officers. That is a really welcome achievement. We are looking forward to the results that we see in the next few months of our second year in office as well.

We have continued to add to the staff of our workforce because we know how important that is to making sure that people can get the treatment that they need. It's because of the funding that's been provided through the state budget, of increasing the health budget across those forward estimates of some $4.4 billion, that we have been able to hire those additional staff and we have been able to have incentives put in place.

Previously, there were no incentives to be able to help attract, across the system, those staff coming from interstate and overseas. We have put in place incentives of up to $15,000 to make sure that we can provide the support for people who are moving to this state and also the support for people who might be even moving from the metro area to take up jobs in regional areas as well. We know that that's right across the country, where a lot of the workforce issues are in terms of our regional hospitals and regional health services as well.

We will continue to look at everything that we possibly can do on that front. In fact, we have recently signed a new agreement with the AMA and the Rural Doctors Association, covering doctors who work for our country hospitals and provide care both in the emergency department and inpatient wards in our hospitals. Part of that has been to expand the sign-on bonuses for GPs who are now working for our country hospitals as well, offering a whole range of new areas where those sign-on bonuses will be available for people for the first time.

We are also continuing to do work in relation to nursing. Part of the enterprise bargaining agreement in relation to the last nursing and midwifery enterprise bargaining agreement was to consider additional work that we can do in terms of regional areas as well. We are continuing to do that work, and that is being considered by the government and also in relation to paramedics as well.

There is no doubt that there are obviously challenges when it comes to workforce right across the country, but we can see that the work that we are doing is starting to pay results. That is in stark contrast to where we were previously, where in fact what was happening just a few years ago amidst the middle of COVID was making nurses redundant. There were packages going out, positions being made redundant—hundreds and hundreds of nurses amidst the middle of COVID being made redundant in our system. That is the exact opposite of what we want to do.

The first thing that we did on this front upon coming to office was to say that we are no longer making our frontline staff redundant. In fact, we want to grow the workforce, make sure that people have got the staff available to get the care that they need.