Question Time

SA Health Doctors' Wellbeing Report

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA (Hartley—Leader of the Opposition) (14:06): My question is to the Premier. Is South Australia's public hospital system broken? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA: Today, The Advertiser has reported that SA Health has released a doctors' wellbeing report, which describes the public hospital system as broken and that healthcare workers have markedly high rates of poor wellbeing and warns of deep-rooted cultural elements.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:06): The clear answer is no, but we are working to improve it. The reason why we undertook to do this work and to do this report is to uncover the issues about how we can improve doctors' wellbeing and address them, chief amongst which is that we have been recruiting extra doctors to improve services, to address the fatigue of doctors, to make sure that there are more doctors to provide those services. Already in our first two years in office, we recruited an extra 329 doctors full-time equivalent above attrition. That is a very significant increase in terms of the number of doctors coming into our system.

That means that there are more services available, that means that there are more doctors to share the load, and we are continuing to do so. We look forward to releasing the updated figures within the next month or so in terms of our recruitment. We have also—in fact, at the beginning of this year—brought a record number of intern doctors into the state that we have recruited ever as a state before. We continue to recruit more doctors and we continue to work with our doctors in terms of improving their wellbeing. We are implementing the recommendations of this work that we undertook proactively to make sure that we can improve doctors' wellbeing, and we will continue to do so.