Motions

Select Committee on Health Services in South Australia

The Hon. C. BONAROS (16:20): I seek leave to move the motion in an amended form from that which I gave notice of yesterday.

Leave granted.

The Hon. C. BONAROS: I move:

1. That a select committee of the Legislative Council be established to inquire into and report on health services in South Australia, with particular reference to—

(a) the opportunities to improve the quality, accessibility and affordability of health services including through an increased focus on preventative health and primary health care;

(b) the South Australian experience around health reform in the state, specifically Transforming Health, EPAS, the reactivation of the Daw Park Repatriation Hospital and other related projects and or programs;

(c) the federal government’s funding of state government services and the linking of other federally funded services in South Australia, such as Medicare-funded GP services, and Adelaide Primary Health Network and Country Primary Health Network; and

(d) any related matters.

2. That the minutes of evidence presented to the select committee of the Fifty-Fourth Parliament on health services in South Australia tabled in the council on 26 October 2021 be referred to the select committee.

3. That this council permits the select committee to authorise the disclosure or publication, as it sees fit, of any evidence or documents presented to the committee prior to such evidence being presented to the council.

For the benefit of all members, there is an addition of paragraph No. 2 in the amended motion, which reads:

That the minutes of evidence presented to the select committee of the Fifty-Fourth Parliament on health services in South Australia tabled in the council on 26 October 2021 be referred to the select committee.

That was just to make it clear that the interim report and the body of work that has already been undertaken by the previous parliament can be considered by the committee when it is re-established.

The motion itself is to ensure the continuation of the health services select committee, which I think many of us will agree carried out a very important role in the previous parliament in giving people with lived experience within our public health sector, giving our medicos, our medical professionals, doctors, nurses, ambulance officers, all medical professionals, and other stakeholder groups and organisations and representative groups the opportunity to share the experiences that related to the state of our public health system in South Australia.

The terms are very clear in terms of what we were looking at. Initially, the committee was established at the end of 2018. I remind members that, at the time it was established, it received unanimous support across all sides of the Legislative Council. The terms of reference that I am proposing, as I have just said, do not deviate in substance from the previous motion, but in particular they enable us to continue to inquire into opportunities to improve the quality, accessibility and affordability of health services through an increased focus on preventative health and primary health care.

As I said, that committee played an invaluable role in terms of bringing to light issues which have contributed to our public health crisis. It provided a forum for those who were at the coalface of our broken health system to share their lived experience and to share their experiences more generally and propose how and where improvements can be made.

It provided the opportunity for, frankly, issues occurring in our health system which never would have seen the light of day to come to light, issues that were very much in the public interest. These were issues such as those around the Women's and Children's Hospital and the state of mental health care in the Women's and Children's Hospital, around cardiac care provided at the Women's and Children's Hospital, and around the tragic cluster of deaths amongst babies and infants that occurred at the Women's and Children's Hospital during COVID.

There are myriad issues, all of which were canvassed in the interim report that was tabled last year, that formed the basis of that interim report and were canvassed by the committee in its previous form. It is my sincere hope that the government and the opposition ought to be equally supportive of having the same level of scrutiny going forward until this committee finalises its report, as a bare minimum.

As far as the government is concerned, I think it is more than fair to say that it went to the polls and indeed won the election off the back of the health crisis that this committee looked at for all that time. It relied on the evidence presented to that committee during that period, time and time again. I suppose there is no need for the government to be concerned that we are going to be traversing old ground and going over the errors in terms of Transforming Health; we have done that as a committee. That was all done in the interim report. We have done the bad stuff, in terms of what Labor did wrong previously.

We have had a good look at what the Liberals did when they were in government, but there is still work that needs to be done by this committee. So, as an absolute bare minimum, what I am asking members of this place to consider is to enable that committee to finalise its report and report on the very important evidence that was provided to this parliament by stakeholder groups in relation to our healthcare system.

In total, prior to tabling the interim report, the committee heard evidence on 22 occasions and received about 25 submissions. It received evidence from SA Health, Asthma Australia, the South Australian branch of the Nursing and Midwifery Federation, the Ambulance Employees Association SA, the Health Performance Council, the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption, SASMOA, the Rural Doctors' Association of South Australia, the South Australian branch of the AMA, the Mental Health Coalition, the Women's and Children's Hospital Alliance, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine and the list goes on.

The committee also heard evidence from a number of parents whose children received less than satisfactory treatment while in the care of our public health system. It heard from other patients in the care of our public health system and the level of care, or otherwise, that they received. As I said, it heard evidence from the Women's and Children's Hospital Alliance, Women's and Children's Hospital staff and parents of patients.

It heard evidence from outspoken critics of some aspects of our healthcare system, including Professor John Horowitz. It heard from Professor Warren Jones. It heard from Adjunct Professor John Mendoza; Oakden whistleblower, Stewart Johnston; and countless doctors and nurses, particularly doctors who were heads of departments at our hospitals at the coalface of our public hospital crisis who came and gave us a very frank assessment of the state of our public health system.

To date, it has canvassed issues such as hospital operating costs, succession planning, ambulance ramping, emergency departments, country and rural services, mental health and paediatric cardiac surgery at the Women's and Children's Hospital and the design of the Women's and Children's Hospital. We covered a lot of ground.

It is only reasonable that that committee be re-established and be able to finalise the report that it commenced back in 2018. Importantly, and this really cannot be underestimated in terms of its value, everything that committee heard was very much in the public interest. Every South Australian deserves to know what the state of our public healthcare system was when the Liberal government was in power—that is the period within which this committee existed—and they deserve to know about the crises that were occurring behind closed doors that would otherwise not have seen the light of day.

That is a really critical factor when we are considering our public health system going forward because if there is one thing that I would put my house on it is that the public health system crisis is not over, and it is not going to be over for some time. Just because Ash the ambo is not on our screens telling us about the state of our health crisis or we are not hearing about ramping at hospitals every day or we are not hearing about the concerns about Hampstead and the transfer of acute patients from the Royal Adelaide to Hampstead every day or understaffing and under-resourcing issues that have occurred to the extent that we were hearing about them last year and the year before that—and nobody is expecting that this government would come in and fix that in a heartbeat or an instant—does not mean that they are not continuing to occur.

That has been the biggest benefit of this committee. It has provided a vehicle through which those issues have been able to be aired publicly so we all know what the state of our Royal Adelaide or our Lyell McEwin or Women's and Children's Hospital or Queen Elizabeth Hospital or Flinders Medical Centre is, because the people at the coalface have been providing us with that evidence. It is heard from management of those hospitals, it is heard from our senior bureaucrats, it is heard from the administration of the hospitals, the people in SA Health, the chief executive, who have had to come and account for the issues that have raised concerns among the public.

So it is only fair—and I am not going to go on about this, but it is only fair—that that committee have the opportunity to continue doing its work but that as a bare minimum it have the opportunity to report on the work it has done to date. That is a huge body of work that ought not be lost. I have to say that prior to introducing this motion I engaged with various stakeholders to get their input into whether the continuance of this committee was necessary or not. My view was firmly clear, but it is also worth mentioning on the record that those same bodies were unequivocal in terms of their support for the committee and ensuring that it be able to continue the important work it has done.

I am happy to speak to this motion again with members individually, if you so need and if you were not here at the time it was first introduced in this place. I am hoping that both the government, which went to this election on the back of a health crisis, and the opposition, which were part of that health crisis for four years while they were in government, are going to see fit to do what they did previously and provide their unanimous support for the re-establishment of this committee so that it can finalise its very, very critical work.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. T.T. Ngo.