Code Yellow

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA (Hartley—Leader of the Opposition) (14:25): Supplementary, again to the minister: when will the government clear the elective surgery backlog caused by that Code Yellow emergency he referred to?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:26): In terms of elective surgery, we are obviously working as fast as we can to bring on capacity of beds across the system that will enable as many elective surgery operations to happen as possible. We are also using private hospital capacity across the system where, to be honest, a market failure of Australia's private healthcare market at the moment is seeing private hospital capacity available despite every public hospital across the country being under pressure. The private hospital market has additional capacity, so we are using that where we can as well to make sure that patients can get the care that they need. We are working with our clinicians to do that.

The deputy chief executive of the department and also the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Mike Cusack, are chairing work with our clinicians to identify ways in which we can improve the pathway for those elective surgery patients as much as possible, looking at work that has happened in New South Wales, for instance, where a number of operations are now able to take place on a same-day basis, clinically safely, which otherwise would have required an inpatient bed and that demand that I spoke about in the previous answer. If we can do more operations safely on a same-day basis, that enables that flow through the operating theatres to happen without that pressure on the beds in the system.