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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-06-23 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

Ambulance Ramping

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:18): The Premier has made a very significant statement today. He is saying that this budget he has handed down is going to fix ramping. He has confirmed that in the house today, and he has also said that we will see the impacts of that almost immediately. He said that at his press conference this morning.

That is very different from the evidence of the past three and a bit years of his premiership so far, which has not seen ramping ended, has not seen it reduce. In fact, it has seen it increase—not by a little bit, but by a lot. Ramping is more than double the level it was when Steven Marshall was elected, promising that he would fix ramping in our health system, promising that he would fix issues in the health system.

But what have we seen since then? We have seen over the past year 112 nurses cut from our hospitals and we have seen over the past two years, according to the Productivity Commission, that we are the only state that has cut funding to our Ambulance Service. Every other state has put it up, but we have cut it by $11 million.

What do we see in this budget that is supposedly going to fix ramping? The first thing we see is that the FTEs, the staff—the doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and other staff who work in our local health networks—are being cut. Over the next year, we are going to have a cut of 371 staff across our local hospital networks. These are not the people in head office in Hindmarsh Square: these are the people in the Central Adelaide Local Health Network, the Women's and Children's Health Network, and also people in the country. Every single local health network in this state is suffering cuts to its staff in this state budget.

How is that a good thing? How is that possibly going to help the ramping situation, which we know is caused by a lack of throughput through our hospitals? We know it is caused by a lack of staff, a lack of availability of beds and a lack of discharge options for people who need it. You only have to look at the budget papers to see that Central Adelaide, the Royal Adelaide Hospital and The QEH are going to be down 164 staff this year. The Northern Adelaide Local Health Network, the Lyell McEwin and Modbury Hospital—a very significant area—are going to be down 58 staff members this financial year. In southern Adelaide, my electorate, the Flinders Medical Centre and Noarlunga Hospital are going to be down 83 staff members. The Women's and Children's Health Network, important to everybody in this state, is going to be down 39 staff members.

There are cuts in every country region across the state as well. Nowhere in this state is exempt from these cuts in staff across our health services: Eyre and North, 10 staff; Flinders and Upper North, 15; the Riverland, Mallee and Coorong, 16; Limestone Coast, 10; Yorke and Northern, 13; and in the Barossa, Hills and Fleurieu region, 22 staff gone. How is that going to address the situation for anybody across this state?

What is the excuse that we have heard from the government? That some of these staff are vaccine staff and we do not need them. We need to be ramping up the vaccine program and we need more staff to do that. We only have 4 per cent of our state vaccinated so far with both vaccines, with doses that they need. This is not a time to be cutting any vaccine staff. That certainly is not the case here. We know that other COVID staff—contact tracing, medi-hotels—are in a separate budget line item; these are local hospital network staff.

Even if you look at their supposed investment in mental health, this has been derided by all the key groups: the AMA, SASMOA, the ANMF and mental health experts like Professor Mendoza, who was walked out for speaking out. They have all spoken against the lack of investment in this package, where we see that the only new acute beds being promised are eight additional beds when well over 100 were called for by these groups. At the same time, this budget only includes the fit-out of these beds, and it says, 'We'll think about funding, opening the beds sometime down the track pending demand.'

We have the demand right now. We have people stuck in our emergency departments for five days on end waiting for beds, but this government's plan is to open a ward of beds that is going to sit there—like an episode of Yes Minister—without any patients in it because they have not put in any money for the doctors and nurses to open the beds and provide the services. It is absolutely ridiculous.

The Premier was at Modbury Hospital today talking about investment there which is going to deliver not one extra bed—zero extra beds for Modbury Hospital—when more are desperately needed. This is a budget that lacks vision, that will cut the health system more, that will set us backwards and that will definitely not end the ramping crisis that patients are suffering right now.

Time expired.

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