Patient Assistance Transport Scheme

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (14:15): My question is to the Minister for Health. What is the minister doing to ensure that country patients who claim the Patient Assistance Transport Scheme (PATS) receive their claim payments within a two to four week timeframe? With your leave, Mr Speaker, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr McBRIDE: My office receives numerous complaints from regional patients who are waiting up to eight weeks or longer to be reimbursed for their travel or accommodation. These timeframes are too long and are putting a financial strain on those already feeling the effects of the cost of living.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:16): I thank the member for MacKillop for his very good question. As members, particularly those representing regional areas, will know, the Patient Assistance Transport Scheme is a very important scheme for helping people get to medical appointments or other health needs that they have across South Australia. It's a system that we have bolstered since coming to government, with the biggest change in well over a decade—almost two decades—by doubling the fuel subsidy rate which was applied to help more people particularly with that cost-of-living expense in terms of where they need to travel to gain help through the public health system.

That has certainly led to more demand on the PATS system and, as the member has noted, there have been a number of people who have raised concerns in terms of the turnaround time for the PATS team to make sure that their payments can be made. This is something I appreciate members raising with me. Recently, I met with the Rural Support Service, who are the area of the South Australian government responsible for delivering this.

The Rural Support Service are effectively the remnants of what was Country Health SA and they provide services on behalf of all the six local health networks in country South Australia. I met with the team and made very clear to them that we need to see improvement in terms of their turnaround times for making those payments available for people in the Patient Assistance Transport Scheme, and they have certainly committed to doing so. They are putting in place a number of immediate improvement initiatives, which include:

recruiting additional temporary staff to assist with phone calls to free up the time for the assessments to be made;

two FTEs from other teams being provided to PATS for three months to assist with current applications;

a quick claims assessment process having been introduced, where a team leader is able to review bulk claims on the system and provide payment to simple straightforward applications that can be quickly assessed.

There are also long-term initiatives that the team are working on, including recruiting a business analyst to review the PATS portal and identify efficiencies and improvements to reduce the processing timeframe and administrative burden for patients completing applications online, and procuring an external agency to review PATS processes and the PATS portal to identify areas of potential fraud and suggest opportunities for efficiencies in the assessment of claims.

Furthermore, an overarching PATS governance committee has also been established, with the first meeting held in recent months, to provide overall governance to the scheme, including monitoring matters such as the current delayed processing times that the member raises and seeking improvements to the scheme for those who use it, and particularly looking at one area of improvement being online digital application processes so that more patients can choose to use online applications which can improve processing and help to prevent any instances of errors occurring. I think that deals with a matter that the member for Narungga raised previously with some of those burdensome paper forms being an issue as well.

In summary, this is an important scheme for South Australians. It is the responsibility of the Rural Support Service to deliver it. They are ultimately responsible to the Barossa Hills Fleurieu Local Health Network board as part of that health network but, ultimately, to all the other health networks across the state. I made it very clear to them that we need to see improvements in those turnaround times, and the measures that I have outlined certainly are welcome and I will be monitoring it very closely and am happy to talk to any members, in terms of their feedback, in making sure that people can get their claims in a more timely way.