HeartKids SA

Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (14:51): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Can the minister update the house on any government investment in services for children impacted by heart disease, and their families?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:51): Credit to the member for Adelaide for having a question and raising it in this house, which can't be said for everybody in here.

There are 185 babies each year in South Australia who are born with congenital heart disease, which is obviously very devastating for those families who are impacted. There are some 18,000 South Australians who live with that condition, and across all of Australia there are some 250,000 people who are impacted by childhood-onset heart disease. One baby is born with CoHD every three hours; it's one of the largest causes of infant death in Australian babies under the age of one year.

Because of that, there is obviously a big impact upon those families, not just because of the health impacts but we also know that many of those families have to travel to the specialist surgeons who undertake that work at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne.

I first met with HeartKids some four years ago, during the midst of COVID, when we were meeting a number of families who, amidst border-crossing issues and a whole range of other problems they were encountering during that time, were having difficulty in terms of their regular contact with their specialists and their surgeons, and HeartKids was there to support them. HeartKids is an incredible charity that supports families right across Australia. At that time, because of the additional pressure that they were seeing, they asked the then government, the then health minister Stephen Wade, for support, to provide them additional support to help them in the work that they do.

They were denied that support at that time. The government said that there wasn't funding available to help them do that, which I thought was really disappointing, given that I met a number of these families and heard about the difficult circumstances that they were facing, particularly with the Victorian lockdown for a lot of that period of time.

In one of the commitments we made before the last election, the now Premier and I made a commitment to HeartKids that we would commit $1 million over four years, to provide to HeartKids, to be able to provide more support for these families, for kids who have been impacted by congenital heart disease. What that has now enabled HeartKids to do is run out some really significant programs in South Australia to support these families. Namely, in terms of mental health, they have been able to provide essential mental health services for both children and families dealing with the challenges of congenital heart disease. We know that early intervention is obviously important and the support that can be provided to these children, and of course their families supporting them, is important.

Importantly as well it has enabled them to provide additional regional support, extending vital resources and support to families in regional and remote areas, ensuring that children who are impacted no matter where they live across the state have been able to receive support. Also, it has enabled what is called the Better Beginnings program. I am really excited that in the past few days we have been able to announce that that Better Beginnings program is now going to be rolled out nationally after the work that has happened here in South Australia.

This means that families are getting face-to-face support, including visits from occupational therapists in play therapy, and this program is really all about that early intervention from birth to age four to deal with the risk of neurodevelopmental delays for those children. HeartKids, with the rolled gold service that we are doing, are able to roll that out across the rest of the country. It's a great partnership, it's helping these families and we are really thankful to HeartKids for the work that they do.