Patient Assistance Transport Scheme

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (14:21): My question is to the health minister. Can the minister give an update on the wait times for the processing of Patient Assistance Transport Scheme claims? With your leave, Mr Speaker, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr McBRIDE: Earlier this month, in the house, the minister said that work was underway to process claims more quickly. PATS staff are still saying there is six to eight weeks turnaround, and this is apparently still too long.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:21): I thank the member for MacKillop for his question and for his interest in this important topic for members of his community, but also other regional communities across the state of note. The crossbench are always asking very pertinent questions in terms of healthcare services for their local communities, different to some other questions that we get in the house.

PATS, of course, is a very important scheme and this government has made very significant changes to improve the payments that people are receiving, particularly by doubling the fuel rebates that people have received—the biggest change in the PATS scheme for 20 years. That has led to more people claiming for PATS, which has put pressure on the team, no doubt, in terms of those timeframes.

As I outlined to the member before, we are putting in extra resources in terms of the processing. An additional two FTE were being recruited to the PATS team. I am advised that, as of now, one of those staff members has commenced and the other will be commencing within the next two weeks. These additional staff members will help, obviously, in terms of reducing those timeframes.

Other improvements being implemented include temporary staff who are helping free up the time of assessors by answering phone calls, two FTEs from other teams are also being provided for three months to PATS to assist the current applications and a quick claims assessment process has been introduced, where the team leader is able to review bulk claims on the system and provide payment to simple straightforward applications that can be quickly assessed.

So there has been a strategy and this has run through the Rural Support Service, which is the old offshoot of what was Country Health SA. It now sits within the Barossa Hills Fleurieu Local Health Network as an administrative arm, but has a committee of governance that has a chair, whom I have corresponded with, and made sure that they know the importance of addressing these areas in terms of improvements of the processing time.

I am pleased to be able to report that we have seen some improvements in those processing times. These are the online claims assessments—not all the paper claims—but for people who have submitted online. If you look back to the week starting 3 October, at that stage there were 822 people who had been waiting over six weeks for their claims. In the most recent week that we have the data for, I am advised, starting 14 November, that was down to three. So that's a substantial improvement in terms of those people waiting over six weeks, albeit that is for the online claims. There may be others who have submitted paper claims.

They have also significantly improved the number of payments that they are making every week. If you go back to the week of 3 October, that week there were 562 claims that were processed and payments made in that week. If you look at the most recent week, the week starting 14 November, that has skyrocketed over that period to 1,637 processes that were paid out in that week, so there has been substantial improvement in terms of the payments being made. We hope to see more improvements as those additional staff come onboard, because we know it is important, particularly as people face cost-of-living concerns and also their healthcare concerns, to get these payments made in a timely way.