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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-06-13 Daily Xml
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Patient Hospital Discharge

Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (14:24): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. How is the government planning to improve timely patient hospital discharges?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:25): Thank you very much to the member for Adelaide. I appreciate her very keen interest in terms of making sure that we can improve the healthcare outcomes for people in South Australia. I think people understand that it is important that we address all elements of the health system and the patient journey to make sure that we can improve the healthcare outcomes for people. A critical element of that is not just the front door of our services but also as people leave, as people can transfer to other services.

There are particular delays that happen at that element that lead to delays in people being able to get into the hospital in the first place and, ultimately, for those people who are calling 000 waiting for an ambulance to arrive. That is why we are delighted that one of the elements of Thursday's budget will be in relation to tackling this issue on two fronts. One is in terms of a $27 million investment that will be going into making sure that our hospitals can operate more across the weekend in terms of continuing the ability for people to get timely discharges when they are medically fit to be discharged.

This will be going into both additional doctors and additional allied health professionals being available to make sure that they can continue those assessments of patients across the weekend, whereas other patients sometimes wait until they get that assessment done on the Monday to be able to be discharged. That obviously leads to significant bed block that happens at the start of the week. The more we can keep that work happening across the weekend the better it is for the patient, who obviously would much prefer to be in their own home if they are medically ready to do so, but also for the health system overall and the next patient who needs that bed.

It was just obviously yesterday that we announced this. One of our consumer representatives in SA Health, Bronwyn Caldwell, spoke about her experience when she said that she was in and out of hospital for three months and getting home was her most important priority. You are there on a Friday morning, everyone else knows you are ready to go, but you are waiting on one thing, and if that doesn't come in on time it is three more nights in hospital at the moment. That's why it is so critical we get additional medical staff and additional allied health staff across the weekend to make sure that that can happen.

The other element that we announced is a continuation of the work that we are doing in relation to people who get stuck with NDIS packages in our hospitals. At the moment, there are about 70 patients a day in our system who are medically ready to leave with an NDIS package but are waiting on other elements to be put in place for that to happen. That is significantly down from where we were before, and my colleague the Minister for Human Services and I have been working together on this over the past six months. That was, I think, 130 or 140 at some stage in the middle of last year. While that has come down, there is a lot more that we can do to reduce that even further.

One of the elements that we are continuing the funding for is a site called Regency Green, where we are partnering with a non-government organisation to help people with psychosocial mental health conditions to leave hospital, get into that supported accommodation unit and ultimately take the next step to get home or into other accommodation after that. That has helped people who have been in our hospital beds. Sometimes they have been in a hospital bed literally for years, and Regency Green has been helping them to do that.

In addition, there is other funding that will help people who are waiting for other accommodation or fixing up elements of their homes and that's the barrier in terms of their discharge. All these people are medically ready to leave hospital, but they're stuck in hospital waiting for those other elements. These are really important measures—I thank the Treasurer for his support—and they will make a big difference to our patients.

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