Naracoorte Hospital

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (14:25): My question is to the Minister for Health. Can the minister provide an update on the $750,000 commitment to develop a master plan for the Naracoorte Hospital? With your leave, Mr Speaker, and the leave of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr McBRIDE: One million dollars in total was committed to both the planning of the hospital and the draft Clinical Services Plan for the Limestone Coast. The draft Clinical Services Plan has now been completed at a cost of around $250,000, but there's no word on the master plan for the Naracoorte Hospital.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:25): I thank the member for MacKillop for his question and his very strong advocacy on behalf of his community, in particular the Naracoorte Hospital. As members may know, the Naracoorte Hospital—being a particularly important regional hospital for the area—needs a lot of work. It is an ageing piece of infrastructure. One of the commitments that we made upon coming to government—where we cancelled the $662 million basketball stadium and committed at least $100 million into country health services—was an $8 million commitment to the Naracoorte Hospital, so we are delighted that those works are now underway. But we made very clear at that time that we always had regard for that $8 million investment in the Naracoorte Hospital, with stage 1 of what would have to be inevitable future stages of work to Naracoorte Hospital, understanding the need there.

Those stage 1 works are underway and will deliver very important clinical and patient spaces for the community, including improvements to accident and emergency services, a state-of-the-art resuscitation room for the community, three refurbished close observation bays, new consulting rooms, a new patient area and refurbishment of existing utility rooms. There are works underway on site, including the installation of mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems for both the resuscitation and close observation bays, works on the waiting room, as well as finalisation of the installation of the medical gas piping. I know those works underway at the hospital were very well received by both the community and the staff, and I thank people for their patience while we are undertaking those works on that busy hospital site.

As the member noted, he was very successful in gaining an additional $1 million in one of the budgets that this government has delivered subsequently for future works of which we dedicated $250,000 to that clinical planning work across the region. As the member noted, that has now been completed, and that Clinical Services Plan provides a 10-year road map for what, where and how hospital and community services will be delivered across the Limestone Coast. It forms part of our commitment to ensuring safe, high-quality services, including developing and expanding care models to improve sustainability, utilising the entire capacity of the Limestone Coast and particularly looking at where we have growth in terms of the capacity that can be offered into the future. That will be useful for informing the services that will be delivered at the Naracoorte Hospital into the future.

The other part of that $1 million was specifically devoted to Naracoorte Hospital and the future plans there. As part of the Clinical Services Plan that has been finalised, we are now progressing to update the master planning works for the Naracoorte Hospital. That involves reviewing the master planning works that have been previously completed, ensuring the infrastructure works required align with the future clinical services that would be needed at the hospital.

We are engaging architects and engineering services through the Limestone Coast Local Health Network to review the previous concept designs and update them in line with the Clinical Services Plan. They will commence developing detailed designs for future infrastructure upgrades and also provide updated cost estimates for future works at future stages. There will be continued stakeholder engagement throughout this process to ensure alignment and collaboration in developing these detailed designs. So that $250,000 investment in clinical planning was really necessary so that we can get this next piece of work of having the architects and engineers onboard to make sure that we can deliver that.

I know of particular interest to the member was part of the future planning, for Naracoorte to have renal dialysis capacity, which no doubt will be something that we will be planning as part of these future stages of works.