Hammill House

The Hon. G.G. BROCK (Stuart) (14:23): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Can the minister update my community on the reason why patients at the aged-care facility at Hammill House in Port Pirie were left with no power for several hours on Friday 24 October? With your leave and that of the house, sir, I will explain further.

Leave granted.

The Hon. G.G. BROCK: There was a planned power outage, the first of two to enable the new A&E building to be connected in the future to the hospital power system. The hospital wards were unaffected, with Hammill House and some other offices affected by the outage. There is no backup power for those areas. This resulted in discomfort for the residents and the alarm bells were ringing continuously. There was no air conditioning and elderly patients were in electric beds that were unable to be operated. If oxygen was needed by a resident, this was not operational. There are five or six bedridden residents there. If planned power outages are planned in the future and the general wards are accounted for by using generators, why was due diligence not done for the aged-care facility at Hammill House?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:24): Thank you to the member for Stuart for his question and his advocacy in relation to Hammill House at Port Pirie. As the member has said, we are building a new emergency department at the Port Pirie Regional Health Service, which is obviously very significantly needed by the community to make sure we can improve healthcare offerings to people in the Port Pirie region.

In relation to the power outage that occurred at Hammill House, I am going to follow up with the Yorke and Northern Local Health Network in terms of what occurred there and what provisions were put in place, to make sure that if there are going to be any future power outages we have contingency plans in place to make sure we can care for the residents of Hammill House, because obviously that needs to be the number one priority. I will keep in contact with the member for Stuart either in this place or privately in terms of what we are going to do to address that.