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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-03-21 Daily Xml
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HEALTH SYSTEM

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (15:30): I would like to inform the house of the current state of the South Australian health system, according to the government's own websites, as of minutes ago. What I am really concerned about is that the people of South Australia do not become the subject of a target-driven and budget-driven health system, because we do not want in South Australia a repeat of the Mid Stafford NHS scandal in the UK where we saw over a five-year period 1,200 avoidable deaths because of target-driven and budget-driven efficiencies.

The current situation in South Australia at 3 o'clock today on the emergency department dashboard was that several of our hospitals were in the white zone, and I just remind the house that the white zone is 125 per cent capacity. So we had the Lyell McEwin and the Modbury Hospital in the white zone. Noarlunga, the Royal Adelaide, The Queen Elizabeth and the Women's and Children's paediatric section were all in the red zone, which is a 95 per cent-plus capacity.

The AMA say that a full hospital, working at best capacity, is 80 per cent. We saw the former minister tell this house a number of years ago that a 90 per cent capacity was acceptable. That is not what is happening in South Australia. On any day you can go onto the government's own websites—on their own dashboards—and I encourage members in this place, if they are not familiar with the dashboards, to go and have a look at the dashboards and see exactly what is happening minute by minute in South Australian hospitals. It is a very informative piece of information, although is not as good as the Western Australian one which is a bit more user-friendly for the non-medically trained and those who are not into health bureaucracies.

But the dashboards here are in living colour, in green, amber, red and white for the emergency departments and their capacities. There are others there as well—the ambulance service dashboard and the elective surgery dashboard. The elective surgery dashboard shows that yesterday, 20 March, there were 13,141 people waiting for elective; 297 of those were overdue, and there had been 47 cancellations.

The other important dashboard that I use quite frequently, and certainly I remind the Minister for Mental Health, is the ambulance service dashboard showing the number of available beds in our hospitals. As of 15:11, 11 minutes past three today, just some 22 minutes ago, there were no mental health beds available at the Flinders Medical Centre; they were three mental health beds short at the Lyell McEwin Hospital; there were two beds at the Modbury Hospital (which is great); there were no beds at Noarlunga (which is the closest hospital to Flinders); they are four mental health beds short at the Royal Adelaide Hospital; there are two mental health beds—and I assume that is ward 17—at the Repat; they are three beds short at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital; they are six beds short in Boylan Ward at the Women's and Children's Hospital paediatric section; and they are two beds short in the Women's and Children's Hospital women's section.

There is a chronic crisis in our mental health beds in South Australia and I hope the outcome of the Swift review that the minister told the house about yesterday is something that we are going to see some results on. Can I also say that the ambulance service dashboard shows the number of ICU beds available or not available in our hospitals at the moment. At Flinders Medical Centre, it is minus one (in other words, they are one over capacity); at Lyell McEwin, it is minus one; there are two ICU beds available at the Royal Adelaide Hospital; they are two short at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital; and there are no ICU beds for the paediatric section of the Women's and Children's Hospital. The health system in South Australia is in crisis. We need to make sure that the new minister gets his head around this with the help of the 13,000-plus bureaucrats he has got so that the people of South Australia get a health service they are proud of.

The Patient Safety Report released just recently showed that there are a number of incidents going on in our hospitals which are very regrettable. There were 7,214 reported falls in our hospitals. In 2008-09, there were 7,333, just marginally more, but I should say that of those 7,333, nine people died, 20 patients required surgical repair of fractures to the neck of the femur, two patients sustained other injuries, and one required surgery after a fractured skull. We do not get that detail in the current Patient Safety Report.

I hope that of the 7,214 reported falls in the 2011-12 period nobody died. I certainly hope there were no hip fractures, and I hope there were no fractured skulls. The South Australian people and the South Australian taxpayers deserve a lot better from this health service than we are getting at the moment. I will be watching the dashboards, as I do every day, to make sure that the government lives up to their promises.

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