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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-02-13 Daily Xml
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Question Time

Hospital Beds

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Leader of the Opposition) (14:18): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Health and Wellbeing regarding hospital beds.

Leave granted.

The Hon. K.J. MAHER: Yesterday, during question time, the minister said in relation to the closure of beds and the need to reopen beds, and I quote:

…the beds available didn't match the current needs of the hospital. One was mental health, the other was subacute.

The model of care for the closed Ward 2A at Hampstead says, and I quote from SA Health's own publication:

This care is termed 'sub-acute' care and is often delivered in an offsite facility.

The unit is a 25 bed ward providing multidisciplinary patient care…to support the patients in their transition to home or another care provider. The unit is not a rehabilitation ward…

My question to the minister is: is the minister aware that the model of care for the 25 beds at Hampstead that the minister closed in December were subacute beds, which the minister himself has said are the ones needed in the health system, and will he now reopen these beds to address the unprecedented crisis we find in our hospital system?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:19): The advice I gave to the council yesterday was based on advice that the chief executive of CALHN—

The Hon. K.J. Maher: You are the minister!

The Hon. S.G. WADE: —gave to a parliamentary committee earlier this week.

The PRESIDENT: Leader of the Opposition, I am finding it hard to hear the minister.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: What we were having was a high number of general medical and mental health patients. What I said was that my advice was that the patients who were—

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order from the opposition benches! I can't hear the minister.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: —needing beds at the Royal Adelaide Hospital were—

The PRESIDENT: Minister, just hold for a moment. I can't hear the minister and therefore I will not be able to rule on your objections. Minister, please continue.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: My recollection of what I said yesterday was that the patients who needed beds were not subacute patients who could go to Hampstead. I did not say they are not subacute patients. The point I was making was that I rely on management, I rely on clinicians to match the patients with the beds, and I think the people are getting well and truly tired of the Labor Party misleading facts in relation to beds.

As well as carping on about Hampstead, the Labor Party also likes to talk about beds at Flinders. The fact of the matter is that the beds in Flinders were opened in January, so it is yet again another example of Labor misleading. After all, it's the former Labor government that was famous for closing beds. In November 2017, they closed the Repatriation General Hospital with a net loss of more than a hundred beds—more than a hundred beds. Since then, the Liberal Party has opened 20 beds at the Repat site, particularly for people in transition, and we have secured the ongoing access to 20 beds at the Repat site in the ViTA complex.

In terms of the response to the patient flow issues at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the most significant initiative that this government has taken was only in recent weeks. After 16 months of trying to fix Labor's mess of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, we were finally able to open the 10 RAH psychiatric intensive care unit beds.

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: The Hon. Mr Hunter, restrain yourself!

The Hon. S.G. WADE: One of the key initiatives that I was able to announce at the same time was that the government had secured the 10 beds at the Glenside site as forensic mental health beds. So considering that the ongoing problems at the Royal Adelaide Hospital are significantly related to mental health patient flow, to be able to get their PICU beds onto the same site as the rest of the mental health beds, as they were always designed to be, to have them on the same site as the other services is a crucial development in terms of securing patient flow.

Let's remember that the former Labor government had the Royal Adelaide Hospital operating with 25 per cent less mental health beds from opening day until we were able to secure the opening of those psychiatric intensive care unit beds in January.

The Hon. I.K. Hunter interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: The Hon. Mr Hunter, we've all got the point.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: So the reduction of the 25 per cent of beds at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in terms of mental health has had a dramatic impact over the last 16 months. I really appreciate the patience of the mental health clinicians and of the ED physicians.

It hasn't been easy to deal with the 25 per cent reduction in mental health beds inflicted on that hospital by the former Labor government. I wish them all the best, with the new PICU being opened, to develop the model of care, and an important step tomorrow will be the ramping summit being organised by CALHN, to get all the clinicians around the table to make sure that they can make the best use of the resources of the hospital to increase patient flow.

There are a lot of ideas coming forward, both through the KordaMentha initiative and through work being done by CALHN, with clinicians who understand their patients and understand their needs, working together to make sure that they provide quality and safe care in a timely way to make sure that once a person has been fully diagnosed at the emergency department they can go to the part of the hospital which can support them, if they need admission, and to provide a timely transfer of care for ambulance teams arriving.

So we are taking time to get over to the closure of the Repat, the loss of more 100 beds. We are delighted that we are seeing additional beds at the Repat, at the RAH mental health unit and at the forensic mental health unit at Glenside.

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