Queen Elizabeth Hospital

Mr ELLIS (Narungga) (14:33): My question is to the Minister for Health. Can the minister guarantee that the chronic pain unit at The QEH will be returned to a single-location easily accessible unit? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr ELLIS: My understanding is that the chronic pain unit at The QEH has been temporarily relocated to make way for 26 new beds. This has meant operating from two different locations, stretching resources and reducing utility. With those 26 new beds presumably there to stay, there is pessimism about the reunification of the chronic pain unit.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:33): Thank you very much to the member for Narungga for his very good question in relation to pain services at The QEH. What members may know is that one of our measures that the Treasurer put in last year's state budget was to fast-track 36 new beds at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital. As members will know, we are doing everything that we possibly can to expand bed capacity to make sure that patients can get the care that they need.

One of the wards at The QEH has not been used as a ward for beds for the past, I think, at least seven or eight years. That is a ward that has been used for both the pain service and the diabetes service. This is essentially a ward that has been built for bed accommodation. It has rooms, it has oxygen, it has all the facilities available to be used as a ward, it has ensuite bathrooms, but it is being used for pain and diabetes services because there has been nowhere else for them to go, and particularly that happened after the move to the new RAH when those services were located to The QEH.

The funding in the budget was less about redeveloping that area of the ward, which largely can be opened as beds with very minor modifications to bring it up to scratch, and more about the funding to establish the pain and diabetes services somewhere else in the hospital. The team has been working with the clinicians in both pain and diabetes to locate space within The QEH where that can happen, to undertake the plans in terms of what services will be needed to move those services into new accommodation. They haven't moved yet, in terms of the member's question, but there are plans to undertake a temporary move and then a permanent move to new locations. That is under consultation under our enterprise bargaining agreement with staff at the moment.

I did happen to visit the pain services in the past few weeks and speak to some of the doctors and nurses there. What was expressed to me, first and foremost, was that they wanted to see a commitment from the government that that temporary move wouldn't be the permanent move—that there would be the permanent move after that. We were able to give that commitment, and we have achieved the funding to enable that second move to happen. They have also raised some issues such as spaces for group therapy and group sessions with their patients. We are working on that to see if we can incorporate that within the plans.

But I absolutely make very clear to the parliament that we are very serious about making sure that we can utilise all bed capacity in our hospital system. Where we have beds that are not being used for beds, essentially—where we have patient rooms with ensuites that are being used for nurses' and doctors' offices—that is obviously not the best possible outcome for the system as a whole.

We want to make sure that we have a good service for pain and diabetes and have good, appropriate facilities for those important services to happen, but we also want to make sure that our emergency departments, which face issues in terms of people stuck in them waiting for a bed elsewhere in the hospital system, are able to get access to beds elsewhere in the hospital system. That is why we are so determined to reopen that ward, to fully staff it as new capacity, particularly at a time when we are also seeing more of our capacity in our hospital system taken up by patients who ultimately need to be out in aged-care facilities but are stuck in our hospital system. We need to open every possible bed that we can. We are committed to doing that and also to working with the pain and diabetes services as part of that consultation underway at the moment.