Mental Health Review

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA (Hartley—Leader of the Opposition) (14:18): My question is to the Premier. How does the Premier respond to the AMA's Public Health Report Card: Mental Health Edition 2025 and what new action will be taken? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA: The opposition is informed the report shows patients admitted to SA's public hospitals with mental health-related conditions during the 2023-24 financial year waited an average of 11 hours and 18 minutes in overcrowded EDs, which is a 70 per cent increase over the past decade.

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier, Minister for Defence and Space Industries) (14:19): Again, I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question. It again goes to the work that the Minister for Health has been delivering as a result of the policy effort that was put in before the election, because we went to the election with a health policy. What we said very clearly was that we were going to open up mental health beds in the state of South Australia.

You have to be capable, as a government, of doing more than one thing at the same time to address a challenge. The first thing is this: we acknowledge that in a perfect world you would see investment into mental health effort that actually prevents someone from having to go to a hospital in an instance. Having said that, we also acknowledge that notwithstanding all of the effort that one can place into that endeavour, there will still be some patients who necessitate hospital admission when it comes to a mental health condition.

Of course, we have seen the challenges with mental health around the nation and, indeed, around the Western world increase. What we have done as a government is deliver on our commitment to open up a lot more mental health beds, and not just in metropolitan Adelaide but also throughout regional South Australia. We have mental health beds opening up in Mount Gambier—that is a very good example of that.

Just on the weekend I was with the Minister for Health at Noarlunga Hospital opening up 24 purpose-built, brand spanking new mental health beds there. Of course, we opened up those beds only a month or two after I was with the minister, along with the member for Cheltenham and other western suburbs MPs, at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where we opened up 24 beds, and we are not very far away from being at Modbury, opening up another 24 beds.

This is a government that is opening up for the first time brand-new mental health beds with a whole new model of care with a very deliberate policy to make sure that we do not just receive patients who need mental health care and then have them released into the community, but we actually have those patients coming into the system and providing the acute care that they need at the point of admission, including in an ED, and then have appropriate facilities with a new model of care to have them stepped down where they can potentially have a length of stay of anything up to months before they are then discharged into the community.

At the heart of that policy is to make sure that that patient gets better care but also that it reduces the likelihood of their readmission. We see, when it comes to acute mental health conditions, that readmission rates are high. Every time that we prevent a readmission by having a new facility with a new model of care, not only is that a better outcome for the patient and the community and the family around them, but it is also of course one less patient unnecessarily readmitted back into our emergency departments, thus freeing up a bed.

What that speaks to is a comprehensive policy effort. We are not just opening up beds willy-nilly. What the Minister for Health is doing is opening up beds in strategic locations with very specific purposes and needs to make a difference where we can. That is why we end up seeing results that translate down the food chain, so to speak, in terms of improved response times.

Again, as we sit in the second to last sitting week of the parliamentary term, the contrast could not be more stark, because what we have on this side of the house is a policy to invest in the health system, particularly as we have an ageing population, and what they are doing is coming up with $7 billion black holes in their budget with one commitment alone. That can't mean much good for the state's public health system. We welcome the policy distinctions, and we look forward to continuing to prosecute them between now and the election.

The SPEAKER: Before I call the Leader of the Opposition, the member for Schubert and the member for Frome are getting a little rowdy there. The member for Elder, you are on your final warning and I am going to put a little 10 per cent loading on that, and the member for Waite as well. If we can all just keep it down that would be good.