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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-10-23 Daily Xml
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Royal Adelaide Hospital

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Leader of the Opposition) (14:30): I thought the minister used the date of 28 May in his personal explanation. He may wish to reflect on that.

The PRESIDENT: Don't give comments, just ask the question. Supplementary.

The Hon. K.J. MAHER: The supplementary question: between the time the minister took the question on notice and the full month before he brought back his answer to the question on notice, did he seek briefings from his department in relation to when he was first informed of this matter?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:30): I am not aware of any briefing requests that I made to my department in relation to that briefing. I will take that on notice, but in terms of the issue itself, the privacy screens were an issue in the media. The opposition, in particular, was trying to make out that it was about trying to hide the fact that there were ambulances that were waiting on the ramp for treatment. The fact of the matter is that the opposition knows full well that the privacy screens were necessitated by its own design flaws in relation to the Royal Adelaide Hospital. In fact, it was only a week before the election that The Advertiser carried an article entitled 'Exposed, exhausted at RAH'. Brad Crouch, dated 10 March, said:

CLOUDS of diesel fumes mean patients arriving by ambulance at the Royal Adelaide Hospital now face the ignominy of being treated, and unloaded, in public view.

Chronic ramping by ambulances due to lack of room in the ED—

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: Point of order: the question was to what the minister knew and when he knew it, and who in his office might also have known it, not the history of the erection of the screens. It is about his knowledge.

The Hon. D.W. Ridgway: He knew that you had mucked up the project. He knew what happened when you were in government.

The PRESIDENT: The Hon. Mr Ridgway, it is a point of order, which I have to listen to. I am allowing the minister some latitude to answer the question. He has only just begun his answer. Minister.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: The whole point I am trying to make here is that this needs to be understood in the context. The opposition was alleging that we were trying to cover up ambulance ramping. The fact of the matter is that we, in fact, were trying to deal with their mismanagement of Health. Over 10 years, they built a hospital, continually failing to engage clinicians, which meant that there were significant design flaws, and the ambulance bay was one of those design flaws. The ambulances, instead of facing outwards—in other words, the front of the vehicle towards North Terrace and Port Road—needed to face the other way. As a result, patients were left in the predicament of being exposed. That is the point I am trying to make. I continue to quote:

The solution has been to order ambulances to use the undercover parking bays so their exhausts—and rear doors—face the open air car park and North Tce.

The result for patients is the public can see them being treated if the doors are open and also watch them as they are unloaded onto trolleys.

Ramping has become a regular feature of the $2.3 billion hospital…

It says later, in paragraph 3 of that article:

SA Ambulance Service paramedics and ambulance officers do everything they can whether at an accident, home or hospital to protect the privacy of patients and for certain cases when necessary they can use sight screens to further protect patient privacy.

Before the election and after the election, there were discussions within SA Health about how they were going to cope with patient privacy. In the short term, they used screens. In the medium term, they used privacy fencing, which was erected in late May.

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