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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-05-17 Daily Xml
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MARGARET TOBIN CENTRE

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (14:29): I would not want the Minister for Health to feel unwanted, so my question is to him. Does the minister accept that there will be increased pressure from mental health presentations at the Flinders hospital emergency department as a result of the government's plan to close 10 acute mental health beds in the Margaret Tobin Centre at Flinders?

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (14:29): I think I indicated in the answer to the previous question that I do not expect that because of the range of things that we are putting in place.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: Various people will mount arguments to support a particular position. It does not mean they are accurate. These positions, these arguments, need to be contested. The whole basis of the Stepping Up report, which was a very serious report produced by this state, which I hoped enjoyed bipartisan support—I thought it had—

Ms Chapman: It did. It didn't mention selling Glenside.

The SPEAKER: Order! Member for Bragg, order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: The whole of the Stepping Up report was based on the fact that the analysis showed we had far too much of our resource in acute beds and far too little in other parts of the system. In order to get help in South Australia from a mental health service, you really needed to be acutely unwell and then could be put away in a bed in a hospital. People who are a bit unwell or on the way to becoming really unwell really had nowhere else to go, so we needed a number of steps to be put in place so there were places for those people to go. Equally, when people are coming out of an acute setting and are in their recovery, there is often nowhere for those people to go and they would go back home into circumstances which may have produced the illness in the first place. So, a range of steps were to be put in place.

We put in extra resources to support that—I think $300 million, from memory—but part of the plan was to reduce the number of acute beds, and that was part of the budgeting arrangements, but also because we do not want to have all of our services supporting acute beds. We want to have a range of services. This is what the Stepping Up plan is about.

It should come as no surprise to the unions (which have been consulted on that since, as I said, 2010) or to the mental health sector (which supports this, as I have said) or to the opposition, that this is what we were doing. I know you can come in here and make it sound as if something dramatic has suddenly been done, but it is not something that is sudden: this is a five-year strategy that we have been working on which, hitherto, has had bipartisan support.

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