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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-11-07 Daily Xml
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Ambulance Ramping

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (14:41): My question is to the Premier. Does the Premier agree with the statements from the Ambulance Employees Association and the Salaried Medical Officers Association that ramping at our public hospitals under this government in the past few weeks is worse than it has ever been in this state?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:41): I know that the ramping at our public hospitals at the moment is completely and utterly unacceptable. I know that this government is not trying to hide this problem as we saw previously, with the government going out morning, noon and night and saying, 'We've got unprecedented flu seasons,' and other problems that are confronting the system. What we're doing is taking action.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Kaurna is on two warnings.

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL: That is very different from what we saw under the previous government, who always wanted to say, 'This is an exceptional season that we're currently having. This is something completely beyond our control. We could not possibly have predicted it.'

The Hon. J.A.W. Gardner interjecting:

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL: Yes, exactly. As the Minister for Education pointed out, they couldn't understand the new calendar that we have, which has been in place for a couple of thousand years, and note that winter was coming up pretty much in the same vicinity each and every year.

By contrast, what we have done is we have acknowledged that the current situation is completely and utterly unacceptable. We have put $800 million back into the budget in September. We made 50 new beds available in October, and only last week we made sure that the decision that 20 beds that were in the budget to be closed at the Repat under the previous government was reversed. Those 20 beds will remain open and, more than that, 20 new beds will be made available as soon as possible so that we can take patients with complex and longer term needs out of our hospitals and make sure that those beds can be available for our more acute patients.

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