SA Ambulance Service

The Hon. J.E. HANSON (14:43): Supplementary: does the Treasurer guarantee that this alleged agreement will mean an ambulance will be available to respond immediately to high-priority incidents going forward?

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (Treasurer) (14:43): The ambulance association and the government have agreed that this will be an important element of improving services. But the government's position has always been that the addition of additional ambulances and ambulance officers will not solve ramping in and of itself. What is required there is what the government is already doing in a variety of other areas: spending more than $100 million across public hospitals and increasing the number of treatment bays in emergency departments—Flinders Medical Centre, Lyell McEwin, I think it is, and others, where we are spending more than $100 million on improvement.

One of the unfortunate ironies of the situation at the moment is that the mere process of actually spending money on increasing the number of treatment bays at Flinders has created problems at Flinders because we have a construction site down there. The fact that we are fixing the problems we have inherited from the past is obviously taking some time. The money is there and it is being spent but whilst that construction site is in process it adds to the challenges to the system that the Minister for Health has expanded upon in recent days and weeks as well.

The other issues that the Minister for Health is already spending money on—state and commonwealth governments are looking at—is how do we keep people who shouldn't be in emergency departments out of emergency departments? The recent opening, within the last three or four weeks, of the—I won't get the exact title right—crisis centre in the CBD is specifically designed for mental health patients who shouldn't be in emergency departments and gives them an alternative treatment option in the CBD to keep them out of emergency departments.

The government responsibility is that we have to do a range of other things, and the minister and the department are, and part of the solution can be additional ambulance officers, but if you don't fix the problems that we have inherited in relation to the number of treatment bays and keeping people out of emergency departments, the mere addition of the number of ambulance officers and ambulances will not solve the problem because there will still be this blockage within the emergency departments.

We accept that it is part of the solution and that is why we have settled on 74 additional ambulance officers instead of the 300 that the union was demanding. We think it is a good settlement deal in the interests of both patients and staff within our public hospitals in South Australia, and we welcome the settlement which has been announced today.