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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-10-14 Daily Xml
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HEALTH BUDGET

Mr GRIFFITHS (Goyder—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:30): My question is for the Minister for Health. How will the government achieve additional savings targets in health when in the Budget and Finance Committee on 12 October 2009 it was revealed that the health portfolio has been consistently unable to control expenses within its budget?

Dr Tony Sherbon, Chief Executive for the Department of Health, confirmed in the Budget and Finance Committee on 12 October that the Department of Health has consistently overspent its budget, including some $120 million in the 2008-09 year, totalling $280 million in the last three financial years. In relation to the 2008-09 overrun of $120 million, Dr Sherbon stated:

The department is required to make up not only the overrun but also any additional savings target.

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health, Minister for the Southern Suburbs, Minister Assisting the Premier in the Arts) (14:31): I thank the deputy leader for his question. I acknowledge that the issue of managing health budgets is a difficult one, and it was a difficult one for Dean Brown when he was health minister. The interesting arrangement that applied when the Liberals were in office was unique; it is not like the one we have. The Treasurer and I actually speak about these issues, we talk about them. In the Olsen government, I understand, the treasurer and the minister for health did not talk to each other and did not show each other their submissions, so there was no—

The Hon. K.A. Maywald: And they shut theatres in the country.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: And they shut theatres in the country. If you look at the cuts in hospital beds, theatres and services in country South Australia, it was the high water mark for reductions in the Brown period, as minister for health. That is not our process; that is not what we are doing. We are trying to maintain not only the system we have but to grow the system. As I indicated before, we have increased the number of—

Ms Chapman interjecting:

The Hon. J.D. HILL: The shadow, shadow minister for health still cannot resist her interjections. Our government is committed to expanding services in health, and every year we put in more resources. It is true that a number of times expenditure has been greater than the budget that has been allocated. That is partly explained by more people turning up and requesting services than were budgeted for. Of course, that gets to the first question asked by the Leader of the Opposition: what are we doing about these services? Well, we are spending more money, but, of course, when we spend more money we are criticised.

How are we going to make the savings? One of the ways we are going to make the savings is by getting rid of waste, getting rid of duplication. That means moving services from one hospital to another, having a more rational allocation of services. Of course, when we do that, the opposition criticises. The opposition says, when we take out some services from Modbury and put them in Lyell McEwin, that they will put them back if they are in government. If we take services from QEH and put them into the Royal Adelaide, they say they will undo that when they are in government. If they have not said that, I apologise. Every time we try to do anything that is hard, every time we try to—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: Mr Speaker, the reaction of those opposite to that comment just demonstrates how obsessed they are with trivia and how little interest they have with actually dealing with the issues of—

Mr PISONI: Point of order! The question was quite specific. It was about how the minister is going to manage his budget. We have not heard any of that yet.

The SPEAKER: There is no point of order. The minister has been answering the question.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I was interjected upon and I responded to the interjections. The point I was making is that we are making tough decisions to try to bring health spending into reasonable control, and part—

Mr Williams: And not winning.

The SPEAKER: Order, the member for MacKillop!

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: I was making the point that we are doing a couple of things. First, we are trying to make existing services run as efficiently as we can to reduce whatever waste is in the service.

Mr Pisoni interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Unley!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: That requires a lot of detailed, complex work and, of course, the cooperation of doctors. I had an excellent meeting yesterday with a group of senior surgeons, who put to me a range of things that we could do to reduce costs in the health service, and I said we would be happy to work with them on some of their ideas.

We need to make the services run more efficiently. Why use a device in a procedure that costs, say, $4,000 when there is another one which is available, which is just as good or better and which costs $400? Those decisions, of course, are made by clinicians, not by the health department and not by the minister. We have to get their cooperation to do those things, but we need to do work of that order.

We also need to do more in terms of reducing the bureaucratic load on the system, and we are doing that. The point I make now it is the point I made before: every single time I, Ernst & Young or somebody else brings out a report that highlights ways in which we can run the system more efficiently, the opposition attacks it. The opposition does not have credibility on this issue because, on the one hand, it attacks blow-outs or overruns, as it describes them, yet every single time we try to reform the system and make it run more efficiently without waste, it attacks every single one of the initiatives. You cannot have it both ways.

It is difficult to run a health system, and this is true not just of this government and it is not just true of this state. Every state in Australia and every government—both Labor and Liberal—have had the same kinds of pressures. We have an ageing population, and more older people require more services, so we have to run the services as efficiently as we can.

We have programs currently in place to find the savings through more efficient use of existing resources. For example, Ernst & Young put a proposition to us that would see a saving of 300 or so jobs in the finance and human resources areas by changing some of the arrangements. We are very keen to do this, and we are working through that. In other areas, we have made some changes.

For example, in the running of pathology services, we have combined the pathology services in this state, bringing together the IMVS, the service that was run at Flinders Hospital (SA Path, I think from memory) and the one that was run at the Women's and Children's. We brought those services together and, as a result we have a better service. It is more integrated, it is more efficient and it saves money, and we are producing better outcomes for the public.

We have done similar things in the use of trauma services. In the past, the Royal Adelaide Hospital had its own remote recovery service, as did Flinders. We brought them together, we have reduced the waiting times people have to wait to get a service and we have saved money. So, there are lots of things—all of them are difficult and complex and none of them is without political pain.

However, the opposition wants to make political pain out of all the gains we make trying to make our service run well. If it were in government now, it would be facing the same issues, and it would be forced to do similar things or see its budgets blow out. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, not in the dream world the Liberal Party occupies.

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