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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-07-05 Daily Xml
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Question Time

Hospitals,

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS (Black—Leader of the Opposition) (14:18): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Will the government update its winter demand strategy to ensure our health system is ready to cope in light of the expected surge in COVID-19 cases? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain further.

Leave granted.

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS: SA Health has just released the latest COVID-19 modelling that shows that hospital admissions are likely to skyrocket in South Australia by more than 50 per cent. At a time when our health system is under unprecedented pressure, this represents a huge risk to South Australian lives.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:19): Thank you very much for this question, and it absolutely is important in terms of the state of our health system and, in particular, the lack of capacity that we have in our health system at the moment. One of the first things we did upon forming government was that the Premier and I sat down with SA Health, with Professor Spurrier and with the police commissioner and we asked that every possible hospital bed in the system be opened up.

We undertook a process whereby over 180 additional beds were opened compared with what it was before the election. Since then, we have been trying to find additional beds to open. The fact is that there are no additional beds because we have been left a system that does not have them in place. People might recall—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The minister has the call.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: People might recall—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The shadow treasurer is called to order. The member for Chaffey is called to order. The member for Morialta is called to order. The minister has the call.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: People might recall, in fact, that the member for Dunstan early in the pandemic, very well supported by us in a bipartisan way, brought online the old Wakefield hospital, as well as the College Grove facility, to say, 'Here is our additional capacity that will be opened—

Mrs Hurn interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Schubert is warned.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: —to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.' Of course, none of those beds were ever used and what happened to them? They ended the lease of those beds. So there are 180 beds that would be fantastic to have available right now, beds that were put in place, a new CT scanner was put in with a blaze of glory, with TV cameras and the like, and all the IT systems were reinstalled in the old Wakefield hospital—

Mr Cowdrey interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Member for Colton!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: —yet the previous government decided to end that lease before we had opened the borders, before we had let COVID-19 into South Australia. So that has left us in a situation where we don't have those 180 beds across Wakefield and College Grove. We have committed in this state budget not 100 beds, not 200 beds, but over 500 additional beds into our health system. This is probably the biggest generational additional investment in terms of our health system that we have ever seen. In the short term, though, we are having to find where we can.

Just in the last few weeks, we have contracted with ACHA Group, who run Ashford Hospital and the Memorial Hospital, for an additional 28 private hospital beds that we are using. We are already using over 100 beds in the private system, we have now increased that by an additional 28 beds into the private system, we have opened up every possible bed we can in the public system and we are using beds in peri-urban hospitals as well.

Ultimately, we need to build more beds in our capacity across the system, which we are trying to do as soon as possible, but obviously that takes time. Any additional way in which we can open up additional capacity in the short term we will do. What we hear from those opposite is a lot of crocodile tears about the situation they left the health system in, and we have inherited, but no actual solutions that they are putting up. There's no proposition—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The Treasurer is called to order. The member for Hartley is called to order. The minister has the call.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: There's no proposition that they are putting forward. In fact, yesterday we had the shadow health minister out there saying, 'Well, Labor have worked out it's going to take so much longer to turn the system around.'

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Hartley is warned. The member for Hartley is on one warning.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: What they are saying is that actually they left it in a much worse state than we ever said it was, and it's going to take a lot longer to turn around than we said, is what the shadow minister is saying.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Member for Schubert!

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: So clearly there is an acknowledgement of the situation that they have left the system in.

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