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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-04-12 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

Health Services

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:32): Members will remember the Mr. Men series of children's books. They were tiny books and they had a series of people in cartoon form. You had Mr Funny, Mr Fat, Mr Fast, etc., and they were entertaining stories for children. There was a little round blue one which had bandages all over him. I cannot remember whether he was called Mr Bump, or Mr Hapless, or Mr Useless, or something, but he was round and he was covered in bandages. He obviously kept running into things and just creating chaos.

If it was not so serious, it would be the exact analogy of what is happening with the Minister for Health and the decisions, or failure to make decisions, on behalf of the people of South Australia to protect their health system financially and to keep services running, and to ensure the competent delivery of services.

Just in the last 18 months, post the announcement that there would be a Transforming Health reform in October 2014 allegedly to prevent the 400 avoidable deaths a year in our hospital system, we have seen a massive shrinking of services in our major metropolitan hospitals months before we have the opening of a new hospital, which I will come to shortly.

This has been followed by the chemotherapy blunder, where 10 patients at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and Flinders received only half their chemotherapy doses, apparently due to a typographical error. We had the privacy breach where, members may recall, SA Pathology staff were being spied on by hidden cameras in smoke detectors, which the Minister for Health ultimately described as 'poor judgment' shown by Mr Barr. Then, of course, we had the prostate cancer bungle by SA Pathology, culminating in the sacking of Mr Ken Barr recently, after 100 men had been falsely diagnosed with prostate cancer, and a review had been launched.

Following the particular problems with the management by this minister, we had the spying scandal. Members will recall 13 clinicians were caught spying on the medical records of Cy Walsh, accused of murdering his father, former Adelaide Crows coach Mr Phil Walsh. That culminated in the revelation that two clinicians had been sacked for snooping as well. We then had further patient records being accessed by other health staff. It just cascaded into disaster after disaster after disaster.

Of course, then we had, one after the other, the exposure of the inadequacies in relation to the new Royal Adelaide Hospital. This was a hospital that was announced, I remind members, 10 years ago by this government. It was going to be a new RAH. It took them years to even get started. Now, they face the situation where there will be a major delay, clearly, in the opening of this hospital, and more expense by continuing to have to run the current Royal Adelaide Hospital and the operation of the two premises.

So, we have the hospital now being identified as not even having strong enough floors to hold filing cabinets for the provision of hospital patient records. We have no indication of where they are going to store all of the radioactive waste in the bottom of the old Royal Adelaide Hospital and whether it is going to be trotted down North Terrace. We have no understanding as to what is going to happen with the patient records through the EPAS system.

This is the $422 million electronic patient records system which was intended for the new hospital but which has been identified as necessarily having to be scrapped if patients' lives are put at risk. The system has already been used in Port Augusta for a couple of years, and now we have a situation where 37 separate failures in respect of the EPAS system have been identified and now published in correspondence.

We have a situation where our health system is haemorrhaging, where the services are at risk, where the new hospital service is supposed to mop up the demand from all of those patients out there, who are going to be crammed into three hospitals out of seven major metropolitan hospitals. We are going to see the flogging off of the Repat Hospital, and what do we have? We have today identification that reports given by Donald Cant Watts Corke in June last year and February this year are making it absolutely clear to the minister that it is not on time, it is way behind, and yet he repeatedly comes into the parliament and says, 'I know nothing. I read nothing. I was told nothing.' We are all in the dark.

Time expired.

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