Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

South Australia's health system is in crisis. Hardly a day passes without a new media story exposing another failure in the state's health system—failures which are causing people unnecessary suffering and in some cases are risking people's lives. These failures are not the fault of the overworked, committed professional medical staff, who are themselves becoming victims of the ongoing health crisis. They do their best to deal with the daily pressures that are the result of poor administration, inadequate funding, cuts to services and the incompetence of the Marshall and Morrison governments, both of which share responsibility for our health services.

It seems that SA Health's administration has become a revolving door, with three senior executives lost in a matter of weeks. This includes experienced mental health doctor Adjunct Professor John Mendoza, who quit his role at SA Health in disgust, telling a South Australian parliamentary committee that South Australia's emergency department wait times for mental health patients were the worst in the world. Just as appalling is that, after all the exposures of failures in institutional care, a resident with a disability at the government-run Hampstead Rehabilitation Centre was recently rushed to hospital in a state of neglect. I was recently told of a medical specialist who could not find a bed for a patient in either a private or a public hospital. In another case, a patient allegedly died after being discharged from hospital too early, very likely sent home because there was a shortage of hospital beds. It seems that premature release is now becoming a regular occurrence.

Elective surgery waiting lists have blown out to years, with scheduled procedures regularly being cancelled at the very last moment, devastating people who have been waiting and suffering for months and, sometimes, years.

The Royal Adelaide Hospital obesity clinic was closed last year, supposedly on a temporary basis, to make provisions for a possible COVID outbreak surge. Appointments were cancelled at short notice, with patients given no explanation as to why.

Tragically, ambulance ramping and emergency department waiting times under the Marshall government have been going from bad to worse. People are suffering. In one reported case a young girl's appendix burst after she waited for hours at the Women's and Children's Hospital. Concerningly, while ambulances wait in line for hours at a time at hospital emergency departments, they are unavailable for other emergency callouts, leaving people at serious risk. On 12 June the Ambulance Employees Association tweeted the following: 'Last night, Friday the 11th, the ambulance service was again stretched well beyond its capacity. An elderly male having a life-threatening medical emergency waited one hour and 38 minutes for an ambulance. He should have received one in 16 minutes. An elderly patient with sepsis should have had an ambulance arrive in 30 minutes. They waited 14 hours. This is the callous inhumane legacy of the Marshall government, aware of the prolonged suffering but unwilling to prevent it.' I can only speculate on the chaos if a major COVID or flu outbreak did occur.

Under coalition governments, the cost of seeing a doctor has never been higher, with the average out-of-pocket cost to see a GP being $39. The average out-of-pocket cost to see a specialist is now $88, and private health insurance has increased by 36 per cent. On top of this the Morrison government has introduced a raft of changes to the Medicare Benefits Schedule which will take place on 1 July. While it is unclear what the full impact of those changes will be, it is almost certain that some patients will face increased out-of-pocket costs. Not surprisingly, people are increasingly turning to public hospitals, skipping essential health consultations or not buying medicine because they simply can't afford the cost.

No amount of denial, political spin or distortion of the facts by the Marshall Liberal government in South Australia will mask the cuts, closures and deterioration in South Australia's public health system. Nor will recent funding promises, made as we head into the next election, to fix the problems made worse under their watch, fool the South Australian people, who heard similar promises in the 2018 election campaign which the Marshall government then failed to deliver on. Healthcare is about quality of life and life-threatening situations. Our health system matters to people. In a country as affluent as Australia the deteriorating South Australian health system is inexcusable and unacceptable.