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

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:28): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. What action is the government taking to address the deep concerns raised by our frontline health professionals regarding the current state of our health system? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mrs HURN: SASMOA has reported in recent safety inspections of Flinders Medical Centre that there were no spaces left to see life-threatening cases, describing the ED as being in chaos, with a doctor advising, 'Today is the worst I have ever seen it. I seriously think that someone could die today.'

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:28): I certainly share the concerns expressed by SASMOA in their statement yesterday, that these are very long-term issues where the previous government didn't listen to those concerns—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: —that had been put in place, for a long period of time.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order, member for Colton and member for Flinders!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: That has led to a situation where we clearly don't have the capacity that we need within the health system. That is why we went to the people of South Australia with a platform to put in place over 300 additional beds. We have now increased that to over 500 additional beds. We have already opened over 180 beds and now added to that by another 28 beds, bringing it up to 210 beds that we have put in place since the election.

To be honest, we are still listening and we are still trying to find out additional propositions from doctors, from nurses, of things that we can do in the short term with the limited capacity that we have inherited from those opposite. We will leave no stone unturned in terms of doing that. We have opened up every possible bed within our public health system in Adelaide. We have opened up additional beds in the private system. We have put patients into peri-urban hospitals.

But all of that is still leading to a significant number of people being stuck in emergency departments, and that is leading to the issues that the member has outlined from her statement from the doctors. We agree with those issues. We agree that more needs to be done. We have budgeted a record $2.4 billion extra into the healthcare system—more doctors, more nurses, more allied health professionals but, more importantly, more beds.

We know what we have seen over the past few years is that the population has gone up, in particular the population of elderly South Australians has gone up, yet the number of beds that we have in the health system has not gone up. It has not gone up over the past few years and so—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: —what we have to do is we have to catch up, and we have to open up additional capacity. That's why we have committed to a huge upgrade at Flinders Medical Centre. That's why we have committed to additional beds at Noarlunga, The QEH—Lyell McEwin, where we have in fact gone further than we committed to at the election. We said 24; we have now gone up to 48 extra beds. We have committed a huge number of additional beds at Modbury Hospital. We have committed to more beds at the Gawler hospital.

We have also, sir, as you would be well aware, committed to tripling the size of Mount Barker hospital. It was great to be up at Mount Barker hospital last week with you, sir, and working with the local community, the local health advisory council, to make sure that we can as quickly as possible put on additional capacity. In fact, we have brought forward our spending in terms of putting more in the forward estimates so that we can bring that on sooner, because we know, when you look at a community like that, the growth is going up exponentially, but it has been stuck at 34 beds for that hospital for the past 20 to 30 years, which clearly has massively outgrown its capability.

So what we are seeing is additional demands of COVID, of flu, on our healthcare system. We are seeing demands of people's delayed care over the past few years where people haven't been able to get the care of elective surgery, primary health care that they need, screening that they need. That's putting additional demand on the system. People are coming with a higher level of acuity to our hospital system, but we don't have the behind-the-scenes ability to care for those patients, so they are getting stuck in the emergency departments, which is ultimately causing these issues, which is what our plans are all about fixing.

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