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

The Hon. E.S. BOURKE (14:31): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Health and Wellbeing regarding the health system.

Leave granted.

The Hon. E.S. BOURKE: Yesterday, during question time the minister stated:

The health system is run by a range of chief executives across the network. They make decisions on how best to manage their beds.

My question to the minister is: do you as the minister accept a responsibility for the health system, or can beds and hospital wards be closed, leading to hospital ramping, without the minister's involvement?

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: If it's such an excellent question, how about giving the minister the courtesy to answer it in silence? Minister.

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:32): I stand by what I said yesterday. The health managers in the health system—

The Hon. K.J. Maher interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Leader of the Opposition, I would like to hear the minister.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: —run the health system on a day-to-day basis, and it doesn't just relate to whether or not particular beds need to be made available on the day. There is a whole range of decisions that they make that impact on the need for people to come to hospital, the capacity to handle incoming patients in relation to hospital discharges. It's not just about whether or not a bed is open or closed. The health system is incredibly complex, and unexpected events, such as the extreme heat event in January, precipitate responses that can't be anticipated.

I expect the managers in our health system to respond to whatever comes. Do I expect them to give me a call as minister and expect me to validate or overturn every decision they make? No; the answer is no. We pay the managers to manage. The government will continue to work with the department and with the local health networks to make sure that the health system is ready to cope with whatever comes, but when we've got 40,000 employees, when we have more than 2,000 beds in the country, half of them being residential aged care, half of them being acute and thousands of beds in the city, it's a very complex network. To think that a minister, one person out of a team of 40,000, could actually be the executive running the whole system shows you how lacking in understanding the opposition is of how the health system works.

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