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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-05-15 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH (Waite) (15:15): A crisis is unfolding across the Adelaide health system in our emergency departments at each of our major metropolitan hospitals. It is time for the government to take action to fix that crisis and to put those emergency departments back on their feet. The house needs to note where we are at present with regard to performance in emergency departments. I draw members' attention to figures provided by national monitors and confirmed to the house in Answers to Questions about how our departments are going.

The hospital in question at the moment is Flinders Medical Centre where, in 2010-11, of emergency cases required to be seen within 10 minutes, only 74 per cent were so seen. Of urgent cases required to be seen within 30 minutes, only 67 per cent were seen. That means 33 per cent of casualties—urgent casualties—were not being seen within the required time. For semi-urgent, it was 60 minutes, and 78 per cent were being seen on time, and so on.

Of course, at the other end of the emergency story, that process whereby people are taken from emergency for their life-saving operation, we find that it takes 41.5 hours for a patient to so progress—almost two days. This failure flies in the face of statements by COAG's expert panel on surgery and emergency access, which insists that emergency surgery should be provided within 24 hours. So, you go into emergency with heart failure and it is taking nearly two days to get your triple bypass. No wonder our emergency departments are clogged up.

This is the problem. People are not being taken out of emergency to the main hospital into an acute bed on time. As a result, there is cab ranking in the emergency department, an array of casualties unable to be taken on for their life-saving operation. That problem cascades through the emergency department, fills up all the beds and moves out the front door into the car park into the ambulances that are ramped up treating patients because emergency cannot cope with demand.

Unless the minister gets a grip of the situation and ensures that there are enough acute beds for emergency patients to progress to the life-saving emergency, the problem will not be fixed. And it is not enough to establish so-called hot floors, an annex to the emergency department, to which patients are simply shuffled into suspended animation, where they are not getting their operation. They are just in there for observation waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and perhaps dying before they get that urgent surgery they so need.

This government has had 10 years to fix our emergency departments. This minister is in his seventh year. This is the ruin that has been delivered. Just this week, on Monday afternoon, of the hospitals in the Adelaide Health Service four were in code white, the other three were in code red. Code white is off the scale. They had patients awash throughout the department.

Hospitals like Flinders do not want to put emergency patients in corridors. As was said this morning by a prominent Adelaide doctor, who is an expert in his field, there is no oxygen, there are no resuscitation equipments, there is no instrumentation, there is no doctor and no nurse to care for them in the corridor, so they are not taking them. Why aren't they taking them? Because people have died unattended in these hospital corridors, and they are saying to the ambulance officers, 'We do not have the resources to cope.'

That raises the question: what is going on in our other hospitals? Are they being kept in the corridors unattended without the equipment they need? This is a crisis. By a COAG standard on the four-hour rule of getting people out of emergency departments, we are the worst performing state in the country under this minister, with only 59 per cent of people complying with a four-year limit.

I found the minister's statement to the house today very unconvincing. He spends $5 billion a year, he has 30,000 people, he has the resources to fix it, and instead he has to fly in experts from interstate at considerable cost to tell him what to do. He has had long enough; he has been the minister for seven years. He is delivering ruin. He is putting the lives of South Australians at risk in our emergency departments. People no longer have confidence that there will be an ambulance to pick them up—it may be ramped already at Flinders—and that, when they get to emergency, they will be seen on time. It is an utter disgrace.

If you cannot get the health system right, you are not fit to govern. This bloke is wasting money on financial mismanagement and other costly wasteful programs instead of targeting the health dollar to where it matters—

The SPEAKER: Member, your time has expired.

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH: —saving lives in our emergency departments. He should go.

The SPEAKER: Order! The member will sit down. Order!

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH: Sorry, ma'am, I lost track of time.

The SPEAKER: You are lucky I did, also. The member for Reynell.

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