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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-09-02 Daily Xml
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Regional Health Services

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (15:30): It should go without saying but regional people deserve access to open and reliable emergency care, exactly the same as people in the city do. We rely on our emergency departments being accessible in our time of need, and when there are regular closures it understandably causes extraordinary angst in communities. Unfortunately, that is what my community in the Barossa Valley is experiencing.

We are seeing ongoing, last-minute closures of the Angaston emergency department. It is of great concern to my local community. Today, we were dealt another blow, because this morning at 11.02am the Barossa Hills Fleurieu Local Health Network shared a post to Facebook advising that the Angaston ED would be closed at 6pm and reopened at 8am on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. This is extraordinarily upsetting for my local community.

I went back to the Facebook post of the Barossa Hills Fleurieu LHN to see if I could compile a list of how many times these closures had been impacting my local community. You can imagine that I was pretty surprised when I found that the majority of the posts had been deleted, which I think is a shame. People need to see, with a transparent view, how many times closures have occurred. These closures have been rolling in my community since January, so it has been nine months that my community has been experiencing uncertainty when it comes to accessing care in critical times of need, and that is very concerning.

Each week over this nine-month period I have been speaking with people about their experiences at local hospitals. Whilst no-one can fault the hardworking nature of all of our doctors, nurses and health professionals in these hospitals, we do need to see the Angaston ED open 24/7 exactly as it is supposed to be.

I previously shared an experience of someone in my local community whose son suffers from epilepsy, and he suffered a seizure after school. It was lucky that the emergency department was open that day, and that is certainly how the mother explained the experience to me, but it really should not come down to luck as to whether people in regional communities can have access to emergency care.

Another experience that I would like to put on the record of parliament today is one of Hayley Laney who spoke to the country cabinet in Kapunda last week held in the community of the member for Frome. Hayley is the mother of three children, two of whom have complex special needs. She has lived in regional South Australia her entire life and has been a Barossa Valley local for 20 years. She spoke really passionately about the concerns and experiences that she had had. She addressed the Premier and the health minister specifically, and I want to share some snippets from her speech:

Our family now has a written plan to bypass local hospitals altogether and go directly to the Lyell McEwin Hospital or the Women's and Children's when [their youngest] Averley is unwell.

This might keep her safer—but it leaves me wondering: how many other families in the Barossa also avoid going to their local hospitals, or delay care altogether, because they know that the services simply are not there?

We are told our closest hospitals cannot take paediatric patients. We are forced to travel between 30 minutes and 90 minutes one way just to see doctors and specialists. And all the while, Angaston Hospital's emergency department has been forced to close suddenly at least five times this year alone. Imagine driving there in crisis, only to find the doors locked. Families cannot rely on these hospitals, and the trust in our health system has been shattered.

She went on to say:

I should be able to trust that when I take my child to hospital, they will be cared for safely. Instead, I fear they will be sent home, placed at risk, and I'll receive a bill for care that was never properly provided.

At the end of the day, this isn't about numbers or infrastructure alone. It's about children—children like mine, who deserve the same chance at safe, local healthcare [like] any child in Adelaide.

I think that is a pretty powerful message for the chamber to hear because it is not just ensuring that kids in the city have access to reliable emergency health care. We must do more to ensure that people in the regions, people in regional communities like mine, can have access to that same level of care. I do fear that if the government does not step up to the task of attracting and retaining more doctors and nurses to regional communities we will see a gradual deterioration of emergency care across regional South Australia, and that is not something that either side of this chamber should be accepting. We must do more. We need to see emergency care in my local community.

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