Nurse Staffing Levels

Ms PRATT (Frome) (14:22): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Can the minister further update the house on any workforce plan for more nurses to service the new hospital beds that have recently been announced? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Ms PRATT: Last week on radio, SA Branch Secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, Ms Elizabeth Dabars, said:

…what we are still missing from this equation is a workforce plan. We need to look after the existing staff and we also need to employ many, many more people and nurture them up because the reality is it doesn't matter how many beds you build, they're not much good if you press the buzzer and no-one comes.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:22): Thank you very much—and my colleagues interject that this was a Dixer, because this is exactly what we are doing: we are hiring hundreds of extra nurses across the system. We have in the first two years of government added—above attrition, full-time equivalents—691 extra nurses into our system. Not only that but we are continuing to bring in more graduate nurses.

This year, the Central Adelaide Local Health Network brought in their record number of graduate nurses that they have ever brought in before. We are providing them with support to make sure that they can get the learning from senior nurses that they need to embed their skills as they come in to work for SA Health. We are also making sure that we can provide them with avenues in terms of advanced practice skills across the system as well—advanced practice skills to work in the ICU, to work in cardiac wards, to work in emergency departments and to work in mental health—where we know that we've got those nursing needs in the future, to make sure that those nurses can get up to speed and can get those additional skills as fast as possible.

We continue to work with the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation in terms of that. We clearly have got the runs on the board already in terms of additional nurses coming into the system. One other feature as well that's part of our policy that I think is worth highlighting is that we have ended the voluntary separation process for nurses. The previous government had in place voluntary separation for nurses; they were cutting nurses across the system. Hundreds of nurses took packages and left the system because of the programs that were put in place by the previous government.

Let's remember that for every one of those packages that was taken, the position was abolished. The position was not replaced with somebody else coming into it: the position was abolished. Many of these were frontline nursing positions across our system, the vast majority in the Central Adelaide Local Health Network, and we are now having to go and rebuild that nursing workforce that was decimated through those redundancy payments that were given under the previous government—during a COVID pandemic. All around the world people were adding more workforce and here we had a program to cut nursing numbers in our hospitals.

The SPEAKER: The member for Hartley on a point of order.

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA: I have given the minister a couple of minutes to roll his arm over, but the question was specifically about any workforce plan. He is now debating the substance of the question.

The SPEAKER: I will listen carefully but I think he is actually giving some context about the situation in the system.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: It is a key part of our plan to not make nurses redundant, to not make our frontline healthcare staff redundant. That is a clear policy difference between the parties and we are happy to state our position very clearly. We will continue to hire more nurses, we will continue to do what we have done over the past two years, we will continue to provide them with additional training and make sure that they've got the skills that they need as we open these additional beds that the Leader of the Opposition said are probably wasted money.