SA Health Doctors' Wellbeing Report

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:14): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. What is the current vacancy rate for doctors in SA Health? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mrs HURN: The SA Health doctors' wellbeing report notes that supply of doctors will need to grow significantly to meet demand but highlights that there is a current shortage of doctors across SA Health.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:14): I will take on notice the exact figure as of today, but over our first two years in office we have hired an extra 329 doctors, full-time equivalent above attrition. So that means that there are a lot more doctors in our system than there were under the previous government, and that has significantly exceeded what we set as our target to do as of the last election. You will recall our election commitment was to hire above attrition an extra 100 doctors, so we have tripled that within the space of two years and we look forward to updating those figures in terms of how we have gone with our future recruitment shortly.

Of course we know that we want to see even more doctors into the future. A key part of that is making sure there are more medical places so we can train more doctors. They are capped by the federal government. We do welcome the fact that one of the key commitments that has been made by the federal Labor Party as part of their commitment in terms of addressing issues across health has been to increase the number of doctors being trained across the country. We hope that that will see an increased pathway to more doctors coming into not just SA public health services but also critically important GP services into the future as well.