Code Yellow

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA (Hartley—Leader of the Opposition) (14:23): My question again is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Can the minister advise whether all Code Yellow conditions have been lifted at our hospitals? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA: On 23 August, The Advertiser reported an order with note 'effective immediately' was given to clinicians in CALHN to cancel non-urgent elective surgeries only days after the Code Yellow was lifted. Doctors from CALHN said, and I quote, 'The clear lie about the code yellow frustrates us all.'

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:23): The Code Yellow has been lifted, and there are no longer statewide elective surgery directions in place. As I said, even when the Code Yellow was in operation, we had conducted 15 per cent more elective surgery operations in July than we had the July before. But obviously we have a decentralised healthcare network—there was legislation that was put through by the previous government—and all of our local health networks and their boards will make local decisions in terms of their hospital capacity. That has always been the case. Many, many years will that be the case, particularly over winter demand, and they will make day-to-day decisions in terms of balancing that capacity. We are also using a significant amount of private hospital capacity where that's available to make sure that people can get their operations as fast as possible.

The other factor that this comes down to is beds. The Premier has outlined very clearly how we are building hundreds and hundreds of extra beds across the system. That's not only important for emergency patients who are coming through either from the ambulance or the waiting room, many of whom get stuck in the emergency department after they have had their emergency treatment, waiting for that ward bed, but it is also important for those surgery patients because when those surgery operations get cancelled it is not a lack of will from anybody for that operation to happen, it's because we don't have enough beds.

Because there is the pressure of those patients coming through the emergency department, difficult decisions have to be made, with sometimes those patients having their surgery deferred because there are not enough beds. That's why we are building those hundreds of extra beds.

We were with Dr Toby Gilbert, the clinical director of medicine at Northern Adelaide Local Health Network, on the weekend, who rightly articulated that the benefit of those beds will not just be for medicine patients and the emergency department patients but also for other surgery patients who sometimes, unfortunately, face those delays because the emergency department patients are overwhelming the hospital in terms of the number of beds that they need.