House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-03-19 Daily Xml

Contents

Ambulance Response Times

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS (Black—Leader of the Opposition) (14:18): My question is again to the Premier. When will all the recommendations of the SAAS review into Eddie's death be implemented?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:18): This is also a question that was canvassed in the Budget and Finance Committee last week. These have only been provided to government in the past week, and there has now been work done on an implementation plan against these recommendations, in which we would expect there to be time lines. Obviously, we want them to be completed and implemented as soon as possible, but both SA Ambulance Service and SA Health more broadly are working through the implementation of that.

As was mentioned earlier, there are a number of recommendations. One firstly goes in terms of the hospital system and the release of ambulances when SA Ambulance is under pressure from our emergency departments. Secondly, it goes in terms of criteria callbacks for patients who are waiting and addresses changes around those and the criteria in which they can occur. I expect that they will be relatively quick to be able to change the criteria to make sure that that can be updated.

It also talks about other issues, such as putting in place teleconferencing so that there can be eyes on the scene in a number of cases between the Emergency Operations Centre staff and the people in the community. There will have to obviously be IT procurement and work through setting that up, which probably would take longer to do so, but we are very committed to making sure that all those recommendations can be implemented as quickly as possible, and the team is currently working in terms of implementation plans and time frames around those.