House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-09-14 Daily Xml

Contents

SA Health Focus Week

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:10): My question is again to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Have any recommendations from the government's Focus Week been accepted and, if so, when will they be implemented?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:10): SA Health has released a report in relation to Focus Week that goes through a number of the measures that happened across our hospital network and a number of measures where work has been continuing and being implemented. As we have talked about in this house before, the idea of Focus Week was not an inquiry or a—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! Member for Schubert, the minister has the call. Order!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: The idea of Focus Week was giving permission to teams located right throughout our healthcare system to identify local issues that can be addressed and local solutions—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The minister has the call.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: —that can be put in place—

The Hon. J.A.W. Gardner interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Morialta is warned. The minister has the call.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: So all our teams were encouraged to work on local solutions to local issues, identifying ways in which there can be improvements—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: —in terms of flow that happens across our hospitals. As the report, which I am sure the member will be able to obtain from the SA Health website, outlines—

Mrs Hurn: There are 26 recommendations.

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: —there is a significant number of work that has happened in terms of improving—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! There are interjections in the nature of supplementary questions, which could be asked at the appropriate time.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: —ward by ward, service by service, hospital by hospital. When you have some 47,000 people who work for SA Health, that's a significant amount of work happening right across the board. We are listening to our staff. Importantly, we are empowering our staff—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Morialta is on two warnings. The minister has the call.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: Importantly, we are empowering our staff to make sure that where they are identifying issues—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Morialta is on a final warning. The minister has the call.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: Where they identify issues that can be improved in their particular local service, in their ward, in their service, that that can be improved.

Mrs Hurn: But you are not doing anything about it.

The SPEAKER: The member for Schubert is warned.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: What we have seen through that process and subsequently are significant improvements. I had the opportunity to meet with a lot of our general medicine teams recently, where they identified work that was happening across the general medicine teams at each of our major hospitals—very significant work that happened out of that week and subsequently to improve systems, to improve processes. It's that microlevel work which is important at the same time that we build additional capacity to make sure that we can improve flow through the health system.