Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to speak about health in my electorate of Boothby, and there are a number of issues that I want to touch on. Blackwood Community Hospital has been providing healthcare services to the Hills community in my electorate since 1954. The hospital has been run on a not-for-profit basis. Unfortunately, it closed its emergency department in October 2010 and all other facilities, including its after-hours GP clinic, in December 2010. The closure of the Blackwood Community Hospital has only exacerbated the shortage of general practitioners and after-hours services in the area. The immediate area around this hospital—the suburbs of Belair, Glenalta, Blackwood, Flagstaff Hill, Craigburn Farm and Hawthorndene—is classified as a district of workforce shortage. It is an area which has less than the national average number of GPs. So there is a genuine need for additional primary care, GP and after-hours services in Blackwood and Belair and the surrounding suburbs.

Recently the hospital site has been purchased by the international muscul­oskeletal research institute, operating as the Southern Adelaide Health Service. Any primary care services that the Southern Adelaide Health Service are able to revive on the Blackwood Community Hospital site will go some way to reducing the shortage of doctors in the area. Any after-hours services they are able to resume will also help take pressure off the already struggling public hospitals in the area.

As an example of the pressure that is on public hospitals in my electorate, the major public hospital in my electorate, Flinders Medical Centre, has recently had an issue of ramping. Ramping involves patients being kept waiting on the entry ramp to the hospital under the care of ambulance officers. It happens when there is a backlog within the emergency department that forces all emergency department beds to be filled, meaning that there are no available beds for incoming patients. Ramping also means that ambulances and ambulance officers are tied up outside the hospital and unable to attend to any other emergencies, as they cannot leave until the patient is handed over to the emergency department. Patients have had to wait up to three hours before being handed over to the emergency department by the ambulance officers. This problem has been going on for almost eight months. In one instance, every ambulance south of the CBD was banked up outside the Flinders Medical Centre waiting to offload patients. In April, a constituent of mine spent more than an hour and a half with a fractured hip waiting on the ramp. In all the recent public appearances, it has been very obvious that the public servants and the South Australian Minister for Health, the Hon. John Hill, have been in complete denial about the nature of the problem and what is going on in the emergency department in Flinders.

It is clear that the public hospital system is struggling in parts and it is clear that the private health system is required to take the pressure off our public hospital system. I have always believed that private health insurance plays a key role in keeping pressure off the public system. These two things, the closure of the Blackwood Hospital and the pressure on Flinders and its emergency department, highlight the importance of keeping private health insurance levels high. The Labor Party have always hated private health insurance. The Gillard government is intent on whittling back and undermining private health due to its continuing attack on the private health insurance rebate.

Almost 96,000 residents in the electorate of Boothby are covered by some form of private health insurance. This represents 71 per cent of households. The Labor Party's decision to wind back the rebates, after they said they would not in 2007, is only going to put further pressure on public hospitals like Flinders, which are already struggling to cope. I look forward to the contribution that the Southern Adelaide Health Institute can make to primary care and to the health network and health system within my electorate and the inner southern suburbs of Adelaide.