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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-09-03 Daily Xml
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Elective Surgery

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:36): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Has the government developed an elective surgery recovery plan, and if not, why not? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mrs HURN: In the 2024-25 state budget, the government outlined that it would:

Develop an elective surgery recovery plan for South Australia to reduce overdue elective surgery and colonoscopies.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:36): All of our health networks have elective surgery plans in place, which we can see the benefit of in the fact that we are dramatically increasing the number of elective surgery operations that our hospitals are performing. Each of the years that we have been in government, we have increased the number of operations that our hospitals are performing. More patients than ever before are getting their operations through the public health system in this state.

What we have seen is that, in the past financial year, 61,920 people in South Australia had elective surgery operations through the public system. That is a 9 per cent increase, or 4,737 more people, compared to 2023-24 and of course is higher than any year under the previous Liberal government and particularly higher than the year when we took the reins after the last election. We are delivering increased operations across our system.

We know that there are headwinds in terms of not only an ageing population but also issues in terms of people deciding to go on the public list rather than getting private operations due to the cost of private surgery and particularly specialists' and anaesthetists' fees that people are having to pay in the private system. So we are going to have to increase that by even more. To do that, we are hiring more doctors and nurses, we are building more hospital beds and we are building more operating theatres to meet that need.

We recently had additional operating theatres opened at The QEH and hospital beds opened right across the system. We are building more operating theatres at our new Flinders Medical Centre development, which is now underway, and our new Mount Barker hospital development, which is now underway. There is, of course, the new Women's and Children's Hospital program as well. Right across the system, we are building more capacity for elective surgery to take place. We are hiring the doctors and nurses to do that. We are delivering more surgery than ever before, with plans to do that into the future as well.

The other factor is that we are working more strongly with the private system, trying to reform the way that we work with the private system to deliver better outcomes. One outcome of that has been the work particularly that the Treasurer led in terms of saving Western Hospital. Part of the arrangements there is that we are making sure that some of the spare capacity that Western Hospital had is now being used to get orthopaedic patients in particular off the public waiting list and through Western Hospital to be able to get their surgery. This is a government that continues to invest in our health system—more theatres, more beds, more doctors, more nurses, more surgery—to make sure that patients can get that care.

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