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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-09-09 Daily Xml
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Women's and Children's Hospital

The Hon. C. BONAROS (15:32): The world-renowned reputation of our iconic Women's and Children's Hospital is under threat and it all has to do with money and a lack of it. While this government pushes ahead with its election promise to build a new Women's and Children's Hospital at a cost the taxpayers of this state can probably ill afford during this COVID environment, it is allowing the current Women's and Children's Hospital to run into a state of ruin.

When 215 doctors who work at the hospital take the unprecedented action of signing a letter outlining their concerns about the state of the hospital, alarm bells should be ringing for all of us. These are some of the state's most gifted and highly skilled medicos who have dedicated their lives to saving the lives of countless women and children. They rarely, if ever, make a public stand, so when they do you would think it is in the best interests of government to listen. They are part of a strong alliance that has formed to voice the critical problems that they and their colleagues are facing on a daily basis working at the Women's and Children's Hospital.

Let's not sugar-coat things here: they have warned us that babies and children have died because of the lack of clinical services and equipment at the Women's and Children's Hospital. They tell us patient care is being compromised on a daily basis because they do not have the facilities, the infrastructure or the resources to ensure that does not happen. These doctors are duty bound to highlight those risks and they are warning us that more lives will be lost if conditions do not improve dramatically at the hospital.

COVID-19 has brought out the very best in this government, in terms of taking advice from our medicos. In this instance, we are seeing the polar opposite to that. We have doctors warning that the path of care the hospital is providing is at least two decades old. We are at least 20 years behind the times. We cannot afford to keep running our once famed Women's and Children's Hospital into the ground until a new hospital is built and opened in 2026 at the earliest.

The health minister's retort to the concerns of the doctors is predictable, if nothing more: the government has invested a whole lot of money into ensuring that there are more staff available and there are more resources available.

Again, I fear the minister is being told by the health bureaucrats what they think he needs to know, not what he must know. We know in terms of that clinician involvement, out of a total budget of $1.8 billion for the new hospital, to date the government has earmarked $600,000 in terms of backfilling clinician positions so that those very frontline doctors can have input to the new hospital, to make sure that those doctors who are on the frontline know exactly what is happening and, critically, are involved in that process.

Is the new Women's and Children's Hospital going to have a paediatric cardiac surgery unit? The current hospital does not, the only mainland state not to. Instead, critically sick babies and children are transported to Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital to have surgery at a cost to taxpayers of about $6 million a year. Forcing young children with potentially fatal critical heart conditions to travel interstate for life-saving surgery is an absolute outrage.

We are not a Third World country. This is Adelaide, South Australia. It is also completely hypocritical behaviour from this government, which in opposition was damning in its criticism of the former Labor government for winding down and neglecting the old RAH while the new RAH was being built. Now in government, the Liberals are doing exactly the same thing with the current Women's and Children's Hospital while attempting to find a site to build a new hospital.

Of course, everyone is fully supportive of a new Women's and Children's Hospital, but at the moment that is at least six years away, and the focus, as these medicos are telling us, should not be on ensuring the demise of the current Women's and Children's Hospital. While the new Women's and Children's Hospital is at least six years away, there is an immediate concern about the chronic and escalating understaffing and under-resourcing of the existing hospital.

Given the long delay to occupation of the new hospital, serious problems will continue to threaten patient care and, consequently, staff morale. The fabric of the hospital is deteriorating and there has been inadequate funding for necessary new and replacement equipment. I have seen a confidential and very comprehensive spreadsheet of funding priorities for equipment replacement and/or upgrade which is pages long and confirms the views that are being espoused by these doctors.

There are major deficiencies in the provision of care for childhood cancer, cardiac surgery for babies and children, mental health and diabetes, and in the medical, surgical and intensive care support for women, and it is not good enough.

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