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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-05-11 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

Ambulance Ramping

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:22): The people of South Australia know that ramping is at absolute crisis levels in South Australia, and now we have the absolute proof of that with the data that has finally been revealed by the Premier to the parliament today. This was asked for well over a month ago and was due to be delivered last week. The Premier refused to provide it to the parliament then and dropped it out to the media over the weekend. What it does show now is the true state of despair that our health system is in under his leadership, over three years into his reign as Premier of the state.

What it shows is that over the past three months we have had record after record after record of not good records: these are the worst ramping figures that we have ever had in this state. The last figures in April show 2,268 hours of ambulances being ramped in South Australia. That is over 76 hours every single day in April that ambulances were stuck outside hospitals, with patients inside who needed proper treatment in the hospital, meaning those ambulances were not able to respond to other urgent cases in the community.

How has this come about? Let's go through one very particular reason, and that is that we have cut the number of nurses in South Australia over the past year. All around the world over this pandemic period, people have been hiring more nurses for their healthcare systems. What have this government done? They have made nurses redundant during the pandemic.

We know that 120 redundancies were given to nurses over the course of the past two years, and most of those were during the middle of the pandemic, which is absolutely shocking, particularly hearing the Premier's defence of cutting emergency department nurses during the pandemic as somehow a good thing. While everybody was preparing for the worst, this government was going around cutting nurses, making their jobs redundant and not replacing them with other people.

We now have the Auditor-General's Report, which finds conclusively that over the past year 112 fewer nurses were working in our health system than the year before. What a disgraceful indictment of this government's management of the health system, and this has come about because of their cuts and their decision to put corporate liquidators, in an unprecedented way, in charge of running our hospitals.

We paid KordaMentha, corporate liquidators, $37 million. They have therefore then paid nurses redundancy packages and other health staff redundancy packages of over $24 million. So out of all of that we are paying $60-odd million to have fewer staff than we did before. What absolute madness. You only have to look at the Productivity Commission, which shows that every other state and territory is increasing the amount of money they are putting into their ambulance service, except one—except South Australia where we have cut that by $11 million over the past two years.

Now we are seeing the consequences. We saw the human face of this yesterday with Agatha, a 93-year-old woman stuck for three hours outside the Royal Adelaide Hospital with broken ribs and breathing difficulties, saying that she would rather die than be stuck in that ambulance. It is absolutely shameful. It is degrading. It is elder abuse. It is atrocious, not having toilet facilities and not having proper treatment. This is becoming a day-by-day reality for South Australians.

We had another case of a caller ringing in while the Premier was on radio this morning. His son had a seizure at school yesterday and had to wait two hours and 13 minutes for an ambulance to come after a seizure. That is absolutely shocking. That should not be happening in South Australia where we should have a well-funded and well-resourced health system.

We had another case that has just come out today of a woman who had an adverse impact from a vaccine, a blood clot, confirmed by GPs undertaking tests. She went to the Royal Adelaide, as instructed, and had to wait around for eight hours to properly be seen. She had to use her jacket and a towel as a pillow because we could not even give her a pillow in this Premier's health system that they are running at the moment under KordaMentha, their corporate liquidators. What an absolute disgrace.

There is another case that has just been reported of an 84-year-old woman who was ramped yesterday for four hours at Flinders Medical Centre following a fall. We are having a litany of apology after apology from the government to these patients who are caught up, once they get exposed in the media, but there is no apology for their cuts to nurses, for their cuts to the Ambulance Service, for their decision to put corporate liquidators in charge and to not listen to our doctors, nurses and paramedics, who are calling out to end the cuts and to invest in services so South Australians do not continue to suffer the consequences of this government's cuts.

Time expired.

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