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

I rise to speak about a very important issue in my electorate, and that relates to the Daw Park Repatriation General Hospital. For over 70 years the Daw Park Repatriation General Hospital has been specialising in the care of veterans. It is a hospital which my grandfather turned to as a returned prisoner of war and where he underwent his rehabilitation before rejoining the workforce. It is a hospital which I know you visited as Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, and we very much welcomed that. There have been a number of excellent new rehab and psychiatric facilities opened at the hospital in recent times.

The hospital was transferred from the Commonwealth government to the state government in 1995, and the expectation always was that state governments would maintain an acute care hospital at this site. Disturbingly, there are state government plans to close the acute referral unit at the Repatriation General Hospital in my electorate. This is not the first time there has been a cloud over the repat. A couple of years ago there was a wish list for Treasurer Kevin Foley which included closing the whole hospital, something which would have been very much in breach of the Commonwealth-state agreement. The South Australian Labor government have so grossly mismanaged their budgets that they will risk patient safety by attempting to close this important unit. This will save them the princely sum of $1.5 million per year. This comes on the back of the government's previous decision to close the acute referral unit on weekends, saving the government $340,000.

This sort of penny pinching is almost as despicable as their previous decisions to pull funding from regional hospitals in South Australia—Keith, Moonta and Ardrossan—at a saving of $750,000, which forced the House of Representatives and the Senate to take the unprecedented step of passing motions which condemned these actions. The closure of the repat acute referral unit is part of a broader proposal to cut 308 full-time positions and 111 beds from the South Australian public hospital system as part of the KPMG and Deloitte reports into our hospital system. Jackie Howard, the Repatriation General Hospital's general manager, has already resigned ahead of these proposed closures. The proposed closure will force more than 7,000 presentations per year to be redirected from the repat to the already overstretched emergency department at Flinders Medical Centre. I have previously spoken in this place on the ramping issues that have plagued the FMC emergency department.

This proposed closure will risk patient safety. We need only look at the story of Trevor Verner from Ascot Park. Trevor has emphysema and has been rushed to the repat five times in the past seven years, where he has been given immediate admission and rushed to critical care. The repat is the closest hospital to his home. Had he been rushed to the Flinders Medical Centre, who knows what might have happened. I call on the South Australian Minister for Health and Ageing to come clean on the state government's plans for the Repatriation General Hospital and to rule out any further cuts to the invaluable services that they offer.