Aged-Care Facilities Audit

The Hon. C. BONAROS (14:33): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Health and Wellbeing.

Leave granted.

The Hon. C. BONAROS: SA-Best has been reliably informed that earlier this year, the state government called for tenders for an external audit of all 45 of the state government-run residential aged-care facilities and multipurpose service facilities in regional and remote South Australia. The audit was in the wake of the Oakden aged-care facility scandal, subsequent investigation and the damning report of the ICAC. The tender document described the scope of the audit as thus:

To engage external contractors to undertake an assessment of all systems and processes and the living and lifestyle environment for all residential aged care and multipurpose service facilities.

The expected start date for the audit was August of this year, with an expected finish date of April 2019 and with a preferred tenderer expected to spend a minimum of two days at each facility. My questions to the minister are:

1. Can the minister provide the house with general details about the audit and the reasons for it?

2. Did the audit commence at the expected start date or has the audit start date been delayed?

3 Is a similar audit being undertaken on state government-owned residential facilities in metropolitan Adelaide? If so, what is the scope and time frames of that audit? If not, why not?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:34): I thank the honourable member for her question, and you might by way of supplementary remind me if I miss issues. The member is completely correct that the government, before it formed government—the Marshall Liberal team—developed a concern about a gap in oversight of residential aged care facilities in South Australia.

My understanding is that there are three basic streams of residential aged care within the South Australian health services. One is what I would call the commonwealth-accredited and funded residential aged care. In other words, these are the allocated places from the federal government and they attract the commonwealth benefits. Secondly, there is the cluster of services, which the honourable member referred to: the multi-purpose services. These tend to be—sorry, don't tend to be, they are all country facilities where both aged care and hospital services are provided.

The third element is what I would call state-funded nursing home-type places. Whereas the second category tends to be clustered in a unit, you might have nursing home patients in health facilities, and the bed itself may not be dedicated to the residential aged care, but because the person who is admitted to the bed is a nursing home-type patient, they are funded accordingly. What happened before the election, and I won't take this opportunity to recount the tragedy of Oakden, but one of the issues that emerged from that is that that second group, the multi-purpose service hospital cluster, was not actually subject to accreditation.

So that was a significant concern to me and I did make public comments before the election that if I was fortunate enough to take up the role as Minister for Health and Wellbeing, I would address that. Since the election, I have had discussions with my department with a view to an accreditation-type audit for that middle section, for the groups that are not subject to commonwealth accreditation. In discussions with my department, and these have been quite recent, so I wouldn't have expected the contract would have been finalised, but I can come back with the details for the honourable member.

But the issues that SA Health and I are trying to grapple with is what is the most cost-effective way of delivering an accreditation review of that middle section because we also want to take the opportunity to do, if you like, a quality check on the commonwealth accredited as well, so we're not excluding that first category. I appreciate that they are subject to the commonwealth accreditation regime, but in discussions with SA Health, there will be some elements of this project that will deal with the first category: commonwealth-accredited residential aged care. Certainly, some of the discussions I have had with my department were recent. I don't know whether the contract has been finalised, but I will come back to the member with details on that.