Health

HEALTH POLICY: STRENGTHENING SOUTH AUSTRALIA’S HEALTH SYSTEM

Introduction

South Australia’s struggle to meet demand for public health care is blowing out to crisis proportions and resulting in less-than-optimal health outcomes across the state. Significant shortcomings in our health system are being exposed by ambulance ramping, staff shortages, extremely long waiting times in emergency rooms and poor access to health services in regional communities. Hospitals in Adelaide operate beyond their capacity on a daily basis, with healthcare workers overwhelmed and feeling unsupported and unheard.

No matter where they live, all South Australians should have access to a doctor and basic healthcare and medical services. These services should be affordable and readily accessible. Healthcare in South Australia must also be able to meet the varying needs of key demographics: seniors, children, maternity patients, mental health patients, aged care patients and veterans.

Addressing our public health crisis will require a complex suite of policies at both Federal and state levels. An important Federal priority will be comprehensive reform of Medicare, which is under increasing strain in its current form, unsustainably funded under current arrangements, and is failing to adequately remunerate general practitioners; Medicare patients’ out-of-pocket costs for seeing their doctor now average $45. The following, however, are South Australian state policies.

OUR POLICIES

Fixing ambulance ramping

This has been a major challenge in South Australia over many years, with both major parties failing to put in place solutions that effectively stop or prevent ambulance ramping at our major hospitals. It is primarily a supply and demand problem: demand is too high, and the supply emergency beds is too low.

One clearly identified issue that impacts ramping is that emergency beds are being occupied by non-emergency patients for long periods of time because there is nowhere else for these patients to go once their emergency health needs are met. These include mental health, aged care and disability patients.

One Nation’s plan is to provide more beds for mental health, aged care and disability patients to improve the supply of emergency beds. If this requires new facilities in proximity to hospitals to accommodate these patients, One Nation will advocate building them but we will first explore if existing health facilities – such as the Women’s and Children’s Hospital when it is replaced by the new one adjacent to the Royal Adelaide Hospital – can be repurposed in order to keep taxpayer costs low.

One Nation will also support more funding for ambulance stations and vehicles across the state, and education for specialised telehealth paramedics.

Supporting healthcare workers

High demand for public health services means heavy demand on public healthcare workers, affecting their wellbeing and leading some to leave public healthcare altogether. Increasing violence at hospitals also impacts healthcare workers’ safety and wellbeing.

One Nation will support public healthcare workers by:

• working to ensure sustainable and effective staff-to-patient ratios are maintained, and to not unduly burden or fatigue staff; and
• improving security and boosting the police presence at hospitals.

Improving health services in regional, rural and remote South Australia

The further away South Australians are from Adelaide, fewer health services are available, accessible or affordable. Depending on where they are, regional South Australian communities have their own unique health needs and it’s critical there is a sufficient degree of autonomy for regional health authorities and country hospitals to prioritise their resources according to local needs.

One Nation will improve health services in regional, rural and remote South Australia by:

• handing decision-making and budget allocation back to regional health authorities and country hospital boards, instead of keeping it centralised in Adelaide;
• investing in more telehealth facilities and technology to improve consultations in remote areas;
• investing in more preventative health care in regional, rural and remote South Australia to reduce incidences of lifestyle-related chronic conditions (such as diabetes and heart disease) prevalent in regional communities; and
• where cost-effective and practical, restoring and resourcing run-down, neglected or closed regional hospitals and facilities to provide health services such as cancer care, rehabilitation and palliative care.

Attracting and retaining doctors and health professionals

Without a concerted and meaningful effort to incentivise doctors and health professionals to practice in South Australia, the state will always struggle to meet public health demand. Any COVID-era policies still being retained by SA Health must go to bolster the health workforce. One Nation will attract and retain doctors and health professionals in South Australia by:

• developing incentives – for example financial supports for education, training and establishing practices (for example, payroll tax or land tax discounts) – to entice doctors and other health practitioners to South Australia and reduce reliance on fly-in locums;
• ensuring accreditation processes for overseas health practitioners seeking to practice in South Australia are the same for Australian practitioners, and include a requirement for fluency in English to better ensure quality care, but are not restrictive to the point that overseas practitioners go elsewhere;
• acting to restore qualified staff to SA Health by removing any remaining bureaucratic sanctions against employees for refusing COVID-19 vaccinations; and
• prioritising the critical shortage of psychiatrists, psychologists and neuropsychologists, and working with local tertiary institutions to address this shortage and streamline the qualification pathway without compromising patient outcomes or care. At the Federal level, One Nation will also seek to restore 20 mental health appointments per year to Medicare patients after the Albanese Labor government halved them to 10.