Modbury Hospital

The Hon. C. BONAROS (14:51): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Health and Wellbeing a question about jobs at Modbury Hospital.

Leave granted.

The Hon. C. BONAROS: As members of this chamber are aware, Modbury Hospital and the north-eastern community were dealt a cruel blow by the previous Labor government under the auspices of the trouble-plagued Transforming Health program. High-dependency services were shut down, acute medical and surgical beds were closed, and emergency surgery and major elective surgery ceased. This left its emergency department, which sees about 40,000 patients a year, without backup emergency services, and it meant that acutely ill patients were transferred to the Lyell Mac and beyond, sometimes after long and life-threatening delays.

To give credit where credit is due, the current state Liberal government is moving to address the mistakes of the previous Labor government and is in the process of a $96 million upgrade to the hospital, but that has now been faced with problems of its own, with up to 10 staff at the hospital facing an uncertain future. My questions to the minister are:

1. Can the minister confirm that the clinical sterilisation unit at Modbury Hospital is the only outsourced clinical sterilisation unit in the state's public hospital system?

2. In light of the imminent closure of the Modbury operating theatres and the displacement of staff, will the minister act to address this anomaly and ensure these professional staff are re-engaged as public sector employees, as in other public hospitals? If not, why not?

3. How and when did this outsourcing occur?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:53): My understanding is that the contract predates this government. Certainly, that's my understanding. I will need to check about the CSD, whether it is the only CSD that is provided by the private sector. The fact that it is a private service at a public hospital, and that it is Modbury and this government inherited it, highlights the fact that the former Labor government maintained this contract. That's not particularly surprising. With medical imaging, hospital hotel services and in all sorts of domains, the Labor government ran private sector contracts. Their rhetoric in relation to privatisation is hardly sustained in a consistent way.

The honourable member is quite correct in linking this disruption to the CSD services to Transforming Health. The Marshall government is committed to restoring Modbury Hospital as a community hospital after the Transforming Health downgrade, and key to that is elective surgery. We have already seen a move to multiday, more complex, and we are heading towards the re-establishment of a high dependency unit.

With COVID-19, an opportunity arose to actually facilitate that project. It meant that the opportunity was that if we shut the operating theatres for 11 months, the theatres would be ready eight months earlier. SA Health is actively looking at redeploying its own staff, and I do acknowledge the disruption to the staff of private contractors. I have indicated that the government will, as we do with all our partners, work with our partners to minimise disruption. In the end, they are private sector employees under a private contract.