Flinders Medical Centre

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS (Black—Leader of the Opposition) (14:13): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. What action is the government taking to address concerns of the South Australian Salaried Medical Officers Association (SASMOA) following its attendance at the Flinders Medical Centre on 25 March? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS: SASMOA was called to conduct a safety inspection of the emergency department of the Flinders Medical Centre on 25 March, 12 days after a code yellow had been declared. Following the inspection, SASMOA reported that there were seven alleged breaches of South Australia's Work Health and Safety Act.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:14): I am very happy to address issues at the Flinders Medical Centre, although obviously I am being asked specifically in relation to what happened in March, which I think we also answered questions on a few sitting weeks ago. Clearly, back in March there was a code yellow declared at the Flinders Medical Centre, given the significant demand that was in place. The incident management team was put in place to make sure that every step possible could be taken to make sure patients could get the care that they needed within that hospital.

Clearly, we are determined to address that through a variety of different mechanisms in the long term, one of which of course is creating additional capacity, and we were very pleased—the Premier and I—just a couple of weeks ago that we were able to be at Flinders Medical Centre to see the additional new beds that have been constructed and opened at Flinders Medical Centre that are now providing the first steps of that additional capacity across the system that will be coming online this year. Through the course of this year, across major hospitals in Adelaide we will see 150 extra beds and next year 130 extra beds. That's the equivalent of adding a new QEH into the health system.

A lot of the time the issue that we see, and this is true at Flinders Medical Centre as well as other hospitals, is people have been in the emergency department, have had their treatment, are waiting for a ward bed but there isn't a ward bed available for them to get into. That is described as bed block or access block. That means that the next patient from the waiting room or the ambulance can't get in and ultimately impacts ambulance response times as well, despite the fact that we have improved them very considerably over the past two years. That was the situation back in March. Of course, hospitals are still very busy and that's why we need this additional capacity.

At the same time as putting in additional capacity, we are also working on other measures to try to improve the flow and the efficiency of our public hospital system. One of those is working on putting in place teams that can lead to faster senior decision-making in emergency departments, looking at models that have worked successfully interstate and working with our emergency department teams in doing so.

The other key element is looking at what has been working at Lyell McEwin Hospital. At Lyell McEwin Hospital over the past seven months, we have seen a 63 per cent reduction in ramping happening at that hospital. That's a very significant improvement that we have seen over that period of time—63 per cent down—and we need to learn the lessons from what has worked well there and apply them to the other hospitals, such as Flinders Medical Centre.

A number of key measures have worked in terms of what has been happening at Lyell McEwin Hospital, one of which is in terms of having offload beds for those ambulance patients to come in so that they don't have to wait in the ambulance; another is how they have been streaming emergency department patients through the different sections of the emergency department to make sure that they are getting to where they need to be as fast as possible.

The Lyell McEwin is also putting in place discharge ward arrangements, which they haven't had previously. But very importantly as well is they are utilising the funding that we made available to them in last year's budget to put in place additional staff who are working over weekends to make sure that they can improve their discharges through the weekends and reduce the issues that start the week where they are already blocked.

So that's a combination of different measures the clinicians have been working well on at Lyell McEwin Hospital. While we increase the capacity of the rest of the system through the course of this year and next year, we need to also learn those lessons and make sure that that's applied elsewhere.