South Australian Ambulance union fear worsening hospital conditions with elective surgeries set to resume
Elective surgeries can resume at South Australian public hospitals as the government lifts the code yellow it put in place ten weeks ago to ease demand. But the ambulance union says hospital conditions are worse now than they were before describing the impact of chronic ramping on Wednesday night.
Transcript
00:00Ambulances ramping has long been a feature outside of South Australia's major hospitals
00:08and according to the Ambulance Union, this week was one of the worst.
00:12Particularly on Wednesday night where there were up to 23 emergency cases waiting with
00:17no ambulance to send.
00:19The union says extra crews weren't available to respond when a parent was driving their
00:24child who had a head injury to the hospital.
00:27That's an incredibly risky scenario where we have patients being driven to hospital
00:33who have previously had a period of unconsciousness.
00:36The state government has now lifted its Code Yellow alert in public hospitals, which led
00:41to more than 900 elective surgeries being postponed.
00:45It was imposed in late May to try and better manage the massive demand on the state's struggling
00:50health system.
00:52I'm quite confident that the process we have in place moving forward will continue to control
00:57the flow of patients across our system, ensuring that patients receive care where they most
01:01need it.
01:02The state's new opposition leader, Vincent Tarzia, has called on the government to release
01:07more data to justify lifting the Code Yellow, at a time he says the situation in health
01:13appears to be worsening.
01:15Labor said that they would fix the ramping crisis and we know that it's never been worse.
01:19It's never been worse.
01:20Minister Picton is in Sydney discussing mental health, workforce issues and aged care.
01:26The latter, he says, is key to free up hospital beds.
01:29We frankly haven't seen enough work on this and we'll continue to press that this issue
01:34is resolved because that is leading to big problems for state health systems right around
01:39the country.
01:40But aged care is just one thing the state government will have to address as it continues
01:45its attempts to fix the ramping crisis.
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