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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2008-11-12 Daily Xml
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HEALTH CARE PLAN

Mr KENYON (Newland) (14:09): My question is to the Minister for Health. How many additional nurses and doctors have been recruited to increase the capacity of South Australia's public hospital system?

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health, Minister for the Southern Suburbs, Minister Assisting the Premier in the Arts) (14:09): I thank the member for Newland for his question, a very important question indeed.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: South Australia's Health Care Plan is based on increasing the capacity of our health care system, while also managing demand, to ensure that South Australians have access to a world class and sustainable health care system into the future. A key element of that, of course, is increasing capacity by increasing our medical workforce. Today, I can announce that under this government there are an extra 902 doctors and an additional 2,883 nurses in our public hospitals, since we came to government in 2002. That is a net gain and is based on SA Health payroll records.

The full-time equivalent figures are 598 for doctors and 2,153 for nurses. In the past financial year alone, we employed 203 extra doctors and 477 additional nurses. We now have 3,083 doctors and 13,859 nurses in our public hospitals. We have more nurses and doctors per capita than any other Australian state, according to the latest available figures in the Productivity Commission Report on Government Services published in 2008.

We are training more doctors and nurses to meet future needs. We successfully lobbied the commonwealth, recently, to obtain an extra 60 university places in South Australia in medicine. We have also worked with our federal colleagues to provide an additional 135 places for nursing students in this state in 2009. The state's new enterprise bargaining agreement with public doctors also ensures that our doctors are amongst the very best paid in the country. This will make it easier for us to recruit doctors in difficult to fill subspecialty areas in the future.

Our health system is expanding and is being revamped to cope with future demand. South Australia is leading the way with health care reform, and central to this reform, of course, is the Marjorie Jackson-Nelson Hospital. This is a brand new state-of-the-art hospital which will reinforce South Australia's reputation as a progressive and dynamic health care environment and which will further assist in workforce retention and recruitment.

South Australia is and will continue to be a very attractive place for health professionals to work. Extra medical staff are needed for the additional beds we have already created and those that are planned. We have created an additional 248 staffed and available beds—

Ms Chapman interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The deputy leader is warned.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: Excellent. We have created an additional 248 staffed and available beds and we are continuing major redevelopment works, which include an additional 58 beds at the Lyell McEwin by 2009, as part of the $336 million redevelopment which is virtually doubling the size of the hospital, and with more beds to come; an additional 30 beds at the Flinders Medical Centre by mid-2010 as part of the $153 million redevelopment there, and that includes an expanded emergency department and new operating theatres; and over 120 additional new beds will become available when the Marjorie Jackson-Nelson Hospital opens in 2016. That hospital will be an 800-bed central hospital and it is the best option for South Australia as we plough through the 21st century.

We are also, in South Australian health, performing more elective surgery. A record number of 39,970 elective surgical procedures were undertaken in the 2007-08 financial year in the major metropolitan hospitals. This is 2,479 procedures, or 6.6 per cent, more than the previous year. It is also 12.3 per cent, or 4,384 procedures, more than the number undertaken during the last year of the former Liberal government in 2002.

This government is investing record amounts of money in public health. This year we will spend $1.3 billion more than was spent in 2002, and this will ensure that South Australians continue to enjoy world-class health care facilities well into the future.

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