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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-04-13 Daily Xml
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Queen Elizabeth Hospital

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (14:24): It was his 30th wedding anniversary yesterday, sir.

The SPEAKER: Well, we congratulate him.

Mr MARSHALL: Thirty years of bliss. My question is to the Minister for Health. Will the minister immediately suspend all capital works at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital and initiate a full revision of the model and of the costings as demanded by the federal member for Port Adelaide?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (14:24): What we have done at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital—and I have said this before—is that we went to the clinicians with an original plan. Obviously, the original plan with regard to how we were going to fit services into The Queen Elizabeth Hospital that needed to go there was not going to work, and the clinicians pointed that out. What we have done is that we have gone back to the drawing board to work out how this will happen.

We will very soon be in a position to go back to those clinicians with a different plan. Even the Hon. Stephen Wade acknowledged last Friday at the select committee at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital that all the clinicians who gave evidence supported the changes in principle. They all supported incorporating rehabilitation and the brain injury unit and spinal injury into The Queen Elizabeth Hospital. There was not a clinician—in Stephen Wade's own words—who was objecting to what were trying to achieve.

Of course it is going to have implications for a number of clinicians as we put those services onsite in The QEH, and to some extent some clinicians' services are going to have to be displaced, but it is important that we do that in a way that is not going to compromise clinical care. It became clear that, to some extent, with the original plan on how we were going to do that, clinicians had a very strong view that it was going to compromise care, so we have taken that plan away and are developing a new plan.

Obviously, we are going to continue with our plan to move those services onto The QEH site, because it is very, very important that we do that; there are any number of reasons why you would want rehabilitation and brain injury and spinal injury not sitting on their own out on Hampstead Road, a long way from the closest tertiary hospitals. It is an important clinical improvement to actually have them on site at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

Even the clinicians who have problems with the plan all support that—and that is not me saying that: the Hon. Stephen Wade said that in the course of the select committee. It is not often that I would take what the Hon. Stephen Wade said at face value; nonetheless in this case I am prepared to do it. So we are working through those changes, and I am very confident that we will be able to arrive at an outcome that will be acceptable to everyone.

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