Caleb Bond: Steven Marshall has a better health record than his predecessors

Not much has changed since Labor’s Transforming Health disaster but that doesn’t mean they deserve another chance, writes Caleb Bond.

It is said that health is wealth – but judging by this state election campaign, it may be the other way around.

Both the government and the opposition are throwing money around for health like it’s confetti, which is hardly a surprise given our laser-like focus on issues of health for the past two years.

Health is the number one issue of this election. Even though few people have contracted Covid-19, or have had to go to hospital because of Covid, the pandemic has certainly sharpened interest in the issue.

Premier Steven Marshall has a better record on health than many predecessors. Picture: Morgan Sette

And with the previous state election also having be fought along the lines of health – specifically Labor’s disastrous Transforming Health program – voters might well have expected to find South Australia in a better position four years later.

In reality, not much has changed.

The Marshall government’s record on health is certainly better than its predecessors.

It did, to its credit, reopen the Repatriation General Hospital – a hospital that should never have closed. And they have not tried to shut down any other hospitals or remove hospital beds.

But the ever-present issue of ambulance ramping has persisted.

A patient who had been ramped for an hour-and-a-half died at Flinders Medical Centre in November 2019 – the third in 12 months.

Ambulance ramping at Flinders Medical Centre.

In response, SA Health constructed screens around ambulance bays to make it more difficult for the public and pesky journalists and cameramen to surveil the extent of our ramping crisis.

Remember when a broken dishwasher apparently brought Flinders’ food operations to a standstill?

SA Best’s Frank Pangallo in 2019 asked Health Minister Stephen Wade about a report he’d received that patients were being served up meals so dry no one could eat them and that staff had taken the extraordinary step of telling families to bring in their own food because it was so bad.

Mind you, the hospital refused to reheat said food.

Mr Wade explained that it was all caused by a broken dishwasher which meant patients had to be served food in disposable corn-based containers that were unable to be heated, thus meals arrived cold.

SA Best’s Frank Pangallo has in the past questioned the quality of hospital meals. Picture: Matt Loxton

Sir Humphrey Appleby from Yes Minister would be proud.

It took a week to fix the dishwasher, by the way.

A report commissioned by the South Australian Ambulance Service in November 2020 found a “concerning trend” of increasing ambulance wait times which resulted in at least two deaths.

One was a patient who had low blood pressure, a high heart rate, was hypothermic and suffering abdominal pain. An ambulance was dispatched 37 minutes after a triple-0 call and arrived 22 minutes later. The patient died an hour after arriving at the emergency department.

A Productivity Commission report earlier this month found SA had the worst ambulance wait times in the country.

There has been investment in more paramedics this year, but the result of that remains to be seen.

Labor Leader Peter Malinauskas was one of the health ministers in the previous Labor government. Picture: Michael Marschall

Now, suddenly Marshall says he will stump up $500m for health, including upgrading four major hospitals.

Fantastic – but why couldn’t you have spent some of that money across the past four years to build more beds and end ramping?

The problem for Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas, though, is that was one of the health ministers who helped oversee Transforming Health.

Does he now really expect us to believe that he is a reformed man?

I have yet to hear Malinauskas apologise for Transforming Health and closing the Repat. Nor has he unreservedly admitted that closing hospitals was a mistake.

There was a massive response to Transforming Health within the system. Emeritus Professor Warren Jones valiantly led the charge, ripping apart the bungled plan piece by piece. But they persisted.

Former Premier Mike Rann walked back a promise to never close the Repat hospital.

Former Premier Mike Rann pledged the Repat would “never, ever be closed by a Labor government”. It was a promise the government disgracefully walked back, spitting in the faces of veterans for whom the hospital was something of a sacred site.

It was all done in the name of “efficiencies” which would apparently mean we needed fewer beds in the hospital system.

One need only look at ramping to know this is not the case. And Labor has since beat the government over the head for ramping while refusing to acknowledge that it is caused by a dearth of beds they created. This is a cloud that will hang over the heads of both Malinauskas and the Labor Party – and deservedly so.

Never forget that the previous Labor government spent $2.4bn on a new Royal Adelaide Hospital, with its constant cost-blowouts and delays.

A Covid-19 testing site recently at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Kelly Barnes

It is one of the most expensive buildings in the world and the most expensive in Australia.

The second-most expensive building in Australia is Parliament House – and that was completed in 1988.

You would think, for all that money, that they would have included more beds to cater for a growing – and ageing – population.

But no. The nRAH was built with 71 fewer overnight beds even thought the system was already operating at capacity.

The Queen Elizabeth University Hospital was opened in Glasgow in 2015 with more than twice as many beds as the RAH and for about a billion fewer dollars.

The ensign atop Parliament House in Canberra, Australia’s second most expensive building. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Labor cannot be so quickly forgiven for these monumental stuff-ups.

Now Malinauskas’s promise to scrap the planned $662m city arena and instead reinvest that money in health has effectively been neutralised by the government’s latest announcement – but it was cynical and insulting to begin with. Why can we not invest in our health system while also building new infrastructure?

Neither party can shower itself in glory when it comes to the health system. But Labor’s attempts to ignore the past are sickening.