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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-04-09 Daily Xml
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Flinders Medical Centre

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:46): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Did the minister approve the Flinders Medical Centre's corridor care trial, and can he guarantee that it won't be replicated at any other hospital into the future? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mrs HURN: On 26 March, The Advertiser reported the corridor care trial as a situation where patients are put in beds in corridors when the emergency department is full.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:47): I thank the shadow minister for her question. As has been publicly reported and discussed, Flinders Medical Centre has been under significant demand pressures. Through the course of the past few weeks, they had ordered a Code Yellow situation in that hospital. The Chief Executive Officer of Southern Adelaide Local Health Network, Professor Kerrie Freeman, took command of the situation and the incident management team, and they worked on a number of different measures to make sure that patients could get the care that they needed in a timely way. One of those which was trialled was allowing offload beds—they were fully staffed—to be utilised. I think there were three, off the top of my head. That was a trial that, I think, lasted a few days and is no longer continuing.

But the key thing that we are doing is building additional beds and building additional capital works. If you look at what is happening at Flinders Medical Centre, just in the past couple of weeks, in fact, the Premier released the plans for the new clinical services building to be built at Flinders Medical Centre: a new tower outside the front of the hospital that will contain, I think, in that building alone, over 90 beds. The totality of the project will be 160 beds across Flinders Medical Centre and the Repat site as part of a joint federal-state project which is now almost worth half a billion dollars.

We know that there is a critical need for additional beds at Flinders. We are building those. In fact, we are fast-tracking a number of beds at the moment. We have cleared out what was previously administrative space within the hospital to make room for additional beds to be constructed. Those beds are close to completion; some 20 additional beds will be coming online that were fast-tracked. That will be a help, but of course we need all of those other beds as well, and that is why we are determined to make sure that that investment is delivered.

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