People seeking urgent hospital treatment in Adelaide would be sent to one of three emergency departments while services at three other major metropolitan hospitals were scaled back, under a plan being considered by the State Government.
Under the Transforming Health review, due to be released next month, Health Minister Jack Snelling said it would be better to concentrate urgent cases at the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, the Lyell McEwin Hospital and Flinders Medical Centre.
He said services at the emergency departments at the Modbury, Queen Elizabeth and Noarlunga Hospitals would be scaled back to deal with non-life threatening conditions such as broken bones.
Mr Snelling said resources were spread too thin.
“What’s quite clear from what our doctors and nurses have been telling me who have been part of Transforming Health is that we’re just not able to offer the 24/7 care at our emergency departments that we need to, and as a result of that we have very different outcomes depending on what time of the day you present with a life-threatening condition,” he said.
“So your chances of surviving a stroke, for example, will vary greatly whether you present during the day at two o’clock in the afternoon, or whether you turn up at two o’clock in the morning.
“At the moment we have patients dying because they’re turning up to our emergency departments at a time of the day when we just don’t have the services there.
“We need to vastly improve our around-the-clock cover for those life-threatening conditions. We can’t do that at all six of our metropolitan emergency departments.”
Mr Snelling said the answer was not to spend more money at each hospital, but to consolidate services.
“If you’re a clinician, a doctor or a nurse, in one of these highly specialised areas, you need to be seeing these sorts of patients all the time.
“When you spread yourself too thinly with these really high-end illnesses, then the clinicians, the doctors and nurses, don’t get their skill levels up and we get bad patient outcomes.
“So even if we had all the money in the world, it still wouldn’t be a good idea to have these really high level services spread across six emergency departments across metropolitan Adelaide.”
Opposition will not support phase out of emergency departments
However Opposition health spokesman Stephen Wade said his party would not be supporting the move, claiming the proposal to halve the number of emergency departments was a cut masquerading as an improvement.
“The system is already in crisis. It will not cope with this change,” Mr Wade said.
“We’re talking about transferring an extra 50,000 patients to the Flinders Medical Centre, which over recent years has persistently experienced ramping and overcrowding and has some of the longest waits of comparable hospitals around South Australia.
“The Lyell McEwin Hospital, with the transfer from Modbury, would become the largest emergency department in Australia.
“This is untested, unconsulted proposals, not supported by the relevant college (Australasian College for Emergency Medicine).
“This is not about care, this is about cuts.”
The State Government said it would release its consultation paper next month with a final decision to be made in March.