With a state election looming, South Australian (SA) Premier Steven Marshall has released a list of hospital upgrades underway or already completed, in response to the opposition’s health plan, which was revealed on Sunday and aims to address the ramping crisis.
In a social media post on Monday, Marshall revealed seven projects worth around $2.9 billion (US$2.1 billion), the largest of which is the $1.95 billion construction of a new Women and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide, saying his government is delivering long term solutions required to fix what he calls “Labor’s ramping legacy.”
Marshall had said at a press conference on Monday that the previous Labor government said they would transform health, but slashed 500 to 1,000 beds out of the system, whereas the Coalition, by contrast, added hundreds of additional beds to the system, thousands of additional workers, and is upgrading all the state’s health facilities.
This comes after Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas promised 300 new beds, 98 of which would be dedicated to mental health, as well as 100 new doctors, to address the current ramping crisis in South Australia, if he is elected premier in March.
Ramping refers to when paramedics are required to continue to care for patients instead of handing over clinical responsibility to the emergency department (ED).
Among the other hospital upgrades Marshall listed is the $314 million Queen Elizabeth Hospital redevelopment, of which construction is underway; more than $200 million for ongoing country hospital maintenance; $125 million to reactivate the Repatriation General Hospital, with construction underway; and the $58 million Lyell McEwin Hospital emergency department expansion, which is almost complete.
“This isn’t some empty slogan before an election, this is work that we’ve been delivering,” Marshall wrote.
However, during the Opposition Leader’s campaign address on Sunday, he said that Labor is the only party with a plan to fix the ramping crisis.
“Today I will continue to outline Labor’s plan to fix the ramping crisis and deliver an historic investment in our health system,” Malinauskas said.
He emphasised that ramping isn’t only caused by too many people arriving at hospitals in ambulances, but also because there are too many people stuck in emergency departments who shouldn’t be there, but have nowhere else to go.
“We do need more hospital beds, many more hospital beds, but they also need to be the right kind of hospital beds,” Malinauskas said.
He went on to say that evidence shows EDs are overflowing because they are looking after mental health patients for days at a time, which is not what EDs are there to do, and the lack of mental health beds is a major driver of bed block and hence ramping in SA hospitals.
“Now, that was already true before the lockdowns, the border closures, the family separations, and the job losses,” he said. “So now, after two years of the pandemic there is an enormous mental health challenge emerging around us.”
Malinauskas said this is the reason why, as part of his planned health system upgrade, a Labor government would open 98 new beds dedicated to mental health, including three new 24-bed mental health wards at Modbury, the Queen Elizabeth, and Noarlunga hospitals, while also doubling the number of mental health beds at the Mount Gambier Hospital.
This would include the funding to construct and operate them, which would be drawn from scrapping the state government’s proposed $662 million inner-city basketball stadium.
In addition, the Marshall government has increased funding for drug and alcohol services, child and adolescent mental health services, and support for adults with severe mental health conditions.
