An urgent safety inspection of South Australia’s biggest hospital emergency department last month found it was ‘overwhelmed by ramping’, with some patient waiting more than 24 hours for a bed. While the government say it is sparing no expense to reduce hospital strain, SA Health continues to operate under a system-wide internal emergency.
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00:00The treasurer among robots, continuing his post-budget sell.
00:08When it comes to energy bills, we know that this is a major outgoing for all businesses
00:13in South Australia and we're doing what we can to help them.
00:16But one of the government's biggest outgoings, health, remains a sore point.
00:20Certainly I think we all understand that the system is pretty much broken.
00:25The Doctors' Union conducted a safety inspection of the Royal Adelaide Hospital last month,
00:30finding its emergency department overwhelmed by ramping and staff fatigued and burnt out
00:36by relentless access block.
00:39There were about 53 to 54 patients in the emergency department waiting access to ward
00:45beds that were also full.
00:47It's awful for those patients, it's awful for those around them and it's very difficult
00:51for the clinicians in SA Health who were promised that Labor had a plan to fix this.
00:57The government says it's employed more than 1,000 frontline health workers to help ease pressure.
01:03The government is certainly sparing no expense to make sure we're adequately resourcing our
01:07hospitals but they are under enormous pressure.
01:10We have got record numbers of patients coming in through the front door.
01:13A system-wide SA Health internal emergency has been in place for almost a fortnight,
01:19resulting in the cancellation of more than 500 non-urgent elective surgeries.
01:2434 operations were cancelled today alone.
01:28As soon as SA Health can identify additional capacity to get these surgeries rescheduled,
01:33they are doing that.
01:34The government says it's monitoring the situation on a daily basis.