SA Pathology

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (14:56): Thank you, Mr President. I seek leave to make a brief explanation before addressing a question to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing on the topic of South Australian Pathology.

Leave granted.

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS: In relation to recent revelations about delays and losses of SA Pathology blood tests, the minister advised the chamber during question time on 16 May that a task force had been established, headed by Dr Tom Stubbs. The minister also detailed how 30 extra staff were being hired by SA Health. However, I am informed by Professionals Australia, a network of 25,000 Australian professionals, including those working in medical science, that the problem is far broader than just EPLIS and data entry and that fixing it will require an increase of the medical scientist and technical officer workforce by approximately 10 per cent across the board.

It was noted at the time that staff were being hired to expedite data entry into the statewide EPLIS system. My questions to the minister are:

1. Can the minister advise how many of the 30 additional staff hired by SA Health are qualified medical scientists and technical officers, or are anticipated to be, and if they haven't yet commenced, when will they all have commenced?

2. What are the terms of reference for the inquiries of Dr Stubbs' task force and, specifically, will that task force take a narrow focus on issues of data entry and EPLIS or will wider workforce issues, such as a substantial increase in the employment of qualified scientific and technical personnel, be considered?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:57): I thank the honourable member for her question. The member is certainly correct to say that there are two streams of issues in relation to SA Pathology. If I could focus first of all on the delays in testing and the task force. The task force is primarily focused on the issues that emerged particularly from December last year.

With the 30 additional staff, let's be clear, attempts to recruit them have been going on for some time. I think when I was first briefed on the matter the number of the 30 who had been recruited was still in single figures. I think the most recent briefing I received was that we were up to 26. So, you are right, the 30 additional staff are not fully employed yet. My understanding is that, overwhelmingly, those people are not medical scientists, they are data entry specialists.

This highlights one of the issues of the transition from the legacy system to the new system. The time that it takes to input data into the new system has significantly increased. The advice I was given was that in the old system it might take you less than a minute to enter the information for a single patient but that in some cases in the new system it is taking up to three minutes, so it's a threefold increase.

Also, my understanding is that there is a need for double entry. In other words, information needs to go in more than one system. The reason why those staff are particularly focused on data entry is because of the transition to EPLIS. I think it is really important, considering the honourable member mentioned the advocacy of Professionals Australia, that this house recognises that there is a significant burden being borne by our medical scientists and other SA Pathology staff. We are greatly indebted to them for their perseverance in what has been an escalating issue.

There are steps being taken to try to make the situation more bearable in the short term. As well as employing extra staff and SA Pathology implementing new systems to reduce transit times for urgent specimens, they are working with a project manager, eHealth and Cerner, the EPLIS provider, to improve system performance. They are also providing additional training and reassigning some existing staff to data entry roles. Certainly, at least for a period—and I think it is continuing—some of the smaller collection centres have actually been closed so those resources can be dedicated to facilitating the transfer of EPLIS.

The other part of the honourable member's question was about the ongoing needs at SA Pathology. In 2014, the former government commissioned Ernst and Young to assess the efficiency, effectiveness and financial performance of pathology services in South Australia. What Professionals Australia describes the impact of that as being is, once the government decided they were going to implement those recommendations, they started planning for staff reductions before the EPLIS program and the efficiency projects were in place. Staff are telling me that the shortages in professional staff have been developing over time. In a way, EPLIS has come on top of that and so an agency that is already under stress has had the challenge of an IT project.

The government is fully appreciating that this has been a stressful period for staff. We appreciate their patience with us as we do the best we can to stabilise the organisation. In terms of Professionals Australia's concern about the former government's failure to be transparent with them about the data that underpinned the project, the former opposition, now the government, gave a commitment before the election that we would not implement the staff reductions that the former Labor government proposed. As far as we are concerned, the efficiency improvement program is paused at this stage and we certainly believe that, particularly after the events of the EPLIS rollout, we need to have a good hard look at keeping SA Pathology strong going forward.