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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-06-05 Daily Xml
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Elective Surgery

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:37): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing, surprisingly. Have any elective surgeries been cancelled this week and, if so, how many? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mrs HURN: On 4 June The Advertiser reported that a memo had been issued to Central Adelaide Local Health Network staff that, quote:

…orders them to cancel category three and non-urgent surgery due to pressure on EDs, which also notes intensive care units at the RAH and QEH are at capacity.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:37): I thank the member for her question. Obviously, as we have discussed in the house many times before, each of our hospitals will make local decisions looking at their capacity in terms of what capacity they have for beds to make sure that they can manage the load of a particular surgery. The key thing also, of course, is when we know we have winter demand to schedule that surgery around that demand as well. So there will be other times of the year where they will increase the amount of surgery that they do.

So just as an example, in terms of how that is managed, last year was a year of very significant demand on our healthcare system and there were many, many reports in terms of elective surgery cancellations in the media, etc. But, despite that, the actual numbers of elective surgery operations that we performed in SA Health increased and increased quite substantially. We had 5,200 more operations that we conducted last year than the year before, so that is a 10 per cent increase in the number of those operations that we conducted for public patients, completely covered through the state government in our public hospitals and utilising private hospitals where there's capacity as well.

Individual hospitals will make day-to-day decisions about their capacity. This is another reason why the government is investing so much in opening additional beds across our healthcare system. It is not just so that we can look after emergency patients but also to make sure that we can manage that elective surgery load that we need to handle as well. We can see the delivery in terms of what happened last year, that despite the pressures, we saw a 10 per cent uplift in terms of the number of procedures that were carried out.

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