Ambulance Ramping

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA (Hartley—Leader of the Opposition) (14:31): My question is to the Premier. Has progress been made to fix the ramping crisis? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA: It was reported on 6 September that the total hours lost to ramping in our hospitals was 5,284 hours, the second-worst month in our state's history, bringing the total ramping hours under the Malinauskas government to almost 110,000 hours in just over two years.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:32): As the Premier has articulated and as I have articulated on a number of occasions previously, the key addition that we need to the system to make sure that patients can get through the system in a timely way is capacity, is additional beds.

When we came to office, there were not plans in place for additional beds and there was not construction underway of additional hospital wards. We have had to start from scratch in terms of doing that work and building that additional capacity in our hospital system.

Just in the past couple of weeks, we have seen the first big chunk of that coming online, which has been at the Lyell McEwin Hospital. We took to the election a commitment to build 24 additional beds at the Lyell McEwin Hospital. Upon coming to government, we doubled that commitment and committed to 48 additional beds at the Lyell McEwin Hospital.

That construction work, all the planning, all the architecture and all the construction has been fast-tracked so that 2½ years in we are able to open those new beds in those new wards that have been constructed on top of the existing hospital building.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The Leader of Government Business and the Leader of the Opposition will come to order. The Minister for Health has the call and he will be heard in silence.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: In the last couple of days of August, we were able to open those additional 48 beds. As the Premier has articulated, the feedback from the Northern Adelaide Local Health Network, and the Lyell McEwin Hospital in particular, has been that that has made a significant difference in terms of unblocking the patients who were bed-blocked in the emergency department. There had been, on a daily basis at the Lyell McEwin Hospital, up to 30 patients bed-blocked there. This means that they can get access to a ward bed when they need it, meaning that the next patient can come in in a more timely way from the emergency department waiting room or from the ambulance ramp, freeing up those ambulances to better respond to people in the community.

In particular, we can also announce that we are going even further in terms of building additional capacity at Lyell McEwin Hospital. We are converting a number of spaces at Lyell McEwin Hospital, within the existing footprint, to additional beds now as well. They will be coming online next year, so that will be an additional 32 beds coming online next year, on top of the 48 beds that we announced this year, bringing to 80 the total beds at that hospital, compared to the 24 that we committed to at the election, all of which are going towards making sure patients can get treated faster through the emergency department and ambulances can get released to respond to cases in the community.

As the Premier has articulated, we have seen an improvement from where we saw those very dangerous levels of ambulance response times in 2022, I think down to 36 per cent from memory in January 2022 to now in the late 50s or, as the Premier articulated in some weeks, in the late 60 percents, with the ambition to get that back to 80 per cent, where it was in 2018.

Of course, that is only one hospital. There are many other hospitals where we have seen those investments come online. We are about to see in the next few months additional beds coming online at Hampstead, which will help to ensure patients who are stuck in the RAH, Lyell McEwin, Modbury and QEH can get out of those hospitals and other patients can use them, as well as many other investments to come.