Hospital Services

The Hon. J.E. HANSON (15:02): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Health and Wellbeing regarding hospitals.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.E. HANSON: In March this year, the ABC reported comments from the Premier about establishing extra medical facilities for COVID-19. I will quote a portion of that:

Two hospitals are set to be reopened in Adelaide, in a bid to help health workers deal with an anticipated surge of coronavirus cases in South Australia…

The Premier said two new facilities would be based at the recently decommissioned ECH College Grove in Adelaide's north-east and Wakefield Hospital in the CBD, and together will accommodate nearly 200 beds.

The Premier was then specifically quoted saying the following:

'These two new facilities will give us an additional 188-bed capacity, this is part of our plan, getting ahead of the game,' Premier Steven Marshall said.

'Our health professionals in South Australia have been planning for this ramp up over an extended period of time. Part of that deals with beds.

'All of those things have been worked on for weeks now, but we are in front of the game and we remain in front of the game in South Australia.'

So my question to the minister is: if the proposal to use the Wakefield hospital had been the subject of planning over an extended period back in March this year, how is it possible that it's still not ready for use after being flagged for this purpose yet again in November this year?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:04): The simple version is that the challenges facing the health system in the first wave are not the challenges facing the health system now. As of today, we have 33 people in the most recent cluster. As of yesterday, I think it was, we had 10 active cases. None of them are in hospital. We do not need a hospital facility for COVID-positive patients in terms of managing our hospital demand capacity.

I think it was in March—yes, March—when cabinet made the decision to secure the ECH facility, the Wakefield facility and the Repat. That was the very month that we experienced our first wave peak, and I can assure you that cabinet was resolutely fixed on the risk that our hospital system would become overwhelmed.

We have seen much-loved communities overseas, in North America and in Europe, communities we are very close to, who have experienced very traumatic hospital demand surges which have completely overwhelmed their system. We were working very hard to make sure that did not happen.

The facility at Wakefield in particular was secured for COVID-positive patients—mildly acute. The ECH facility was more focused on I think they call it a 'cold site'—anyway, a site which doesn't have COVID patients. So there were detailed plans being put in place, but that was very much focused on hospital demand and dealing with people who were basically needing medical treatment, needing hospital care.

I would like to again pay tribute to the public health team within SA Health, the whole 45,000 workers in SA Health across the state but also, as Dr Dharminy did yesterday, I want to pay tribute to the people of South Australia, who have backed their public health team in an exemplary effort of collaboration, because I am convinced, as Dr Dharminy said yesterday, that the success of the suppression of the pandemic in South Australia thus far is fundamentally based on both the skill of the public health clinicians and the cooperation of the South Australian community.

So the reason why the Wakefield facility is not being opened tomorrow as a dedicated hotel quarantine facility as part of the Premier's eight-point plan released last week is because it is a totally different purpose. What SA Health is doing is assessing the options for the current purpose. Thankfully, we are not planning to be using the more than 100 beds at the Wakefield hospital for the treatment of people who are mildly acute in response to COVID infections.

The facility that we are looking for—sorry, and I should say that Wakefield is still one of the possible options, but I am saying it hasn't been identified as the option—is because the purpose is significantly different. We are talking about international travellers who come into South Australia and are found to be COVID-positive, either in transit or on arrival, and it is the view of this government that one of the strategies that can help us reduce the risk of transmission is to co-locate or cohort positive cases in a facility.

The design requirements on a facility for mildly unwell acute patients with COVID-19 is completely different to that in terms of travellers who might have very mild symptoms but in the context of international travel they would be still cohorted as active cases. So I don't make any apology for the fact that we can think of more than one purpose for one building.