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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-02-21 Daily Xml
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Psychiatrists

Ms PRATT (Frome) (14:33): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. What steps will the minister take to retain psychiatrists in SA? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Ms PRATT: It has been reported by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists that 40 per cent of psychiatrists in SA are preparing to leave the profession within the next five years.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:34): I also appreciate this question, which is another area where we are taking action. We recognised the need. There was no action being taken, and one of our election commitments was to partner with the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists to undertake a planning study in how we can better plan the workforce pipeline for psychiatrists into the future. We know that we do, on a per capita basis, have a good number of psychiatrists in South Australia compared with other states, but unfortunately, though, that means that there are still many people who find difficulty in getting access to a psychiatrist in both the public and the private sector. Particularly, in the private sector it can be very difficult for people to gain access to a psychiatrist.

There is more action that needs to happen. We are doing that planning work with the royal college at the moment. We are improving the training pathways for people to get into psychiatry. One of the areas that has been identified in our work with the college is we have a bottleneck in terms of the training for psychiatry, because people who go into that course and do that training pathway through the college have to undertake work and training within child psychiatry, and we haven't had enough child psychiatrists to train more psychiatrists coming through that pathway. That is another reason why we are investing in additional child psychiatrists through CAMHS services, through the Women's and Children's Health Network—

Ms Pratt interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order, member for Frome!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: That was an election commitment we made: those two elements in conjunction to help improve the pipeline of additional psychiatrists coming through to the system to make sure that we can provide the additional support that people need.

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