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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-03-25 Daily Xml
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Coronavirus

The Hon. E.S. BOURKE (15:07): My questions are to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing regarding public health:

1. Is there sufficient personal protection equipment for our health staff, and how many gloves, gowns and masks have you stockpiled for hospital staff?

2. What orders have been placed for more personal protection equipment, who are the orders with, how much has been ordered and when will it arrive?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:08): I thank the honourable member for her questions. It is no revelation that Australia faces a real challenge to respond to COVID-19 in the context of the supplies we need of personal protective equipment. In that regard, we work closely with the federal government, which is the custodian of the national medical stockpile. South Australian Health has its own stocks of PPE, but there is no doubt that one of the challenges of responding to COVID-19 is ensuring that we have enough PPE.

In that regard, that was one of the key factors that led to a decision being made by the national cabinet and that being announced today. For the information of the house, I will read an excerpt from a press release by the Prime Minister, made earlier today:

The National Cabinet is acting on the advice of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee that from 11.59pm (local time) on 25 March 2020 all non urgent elective surgery will be temporarily suspended. Only Category 1 and some exceptional Category 2 surgery will continue until further notice.

This will apply in both the public and the private health systems.

The commonwealth's Department of Health has ordered over 300m additional masks with 30m expected in the next two weeks, and 1m surgical gowns are on order to build on Australia’s stockpile of medical protective equipment. Australian manufacturers have also been engaged to ramp up local equipment production.

By cancelling certain elective surgeries, the national cabinet is acting to preserve resources including protective equipment to help prepare public and private health services to prepare for their role in the Covid-19 outbreak.

So the point I make here is that, yes, we do have supplies, we do have challenges in that regard, so just as we cancel elective surgery during flu seasons, a collective decision has been made on this occasion because we have a collective challenge. The decision has been made to focus our elective surgery effort on the more urgent categories and to protect our protective equipment reserves through the measures that I have outlined.

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