Warren Jones: EPAS, RAH and Transforming Health have severely damaged our health system

OUR public hospital system is beset by the results of three unfortunate policy and planning decisions of the previous State Government – Transforming Health, the Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) and the new RAH, Warren Jones writes.

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OUR public hospital system is beset by the results of three unfortunate policy and planning decisions of the previous State Government – Transforming Health, the Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) and the new RAH.

Transforming Health has been discredited and disbanded. Rather than saving a projected $900 million, it will cost at least this amount by the time its mistakes are rectified. It has left a legacy of overloaded and downgraded hospitals, a stressed ambulance service and has reduced access to health care for the aged, infirm and needy. The return of equity and access to hospital services will be a costly and difficult task for the new Liberal government.

Acute services and beds need to be restored to Modbury and Noarlunga Hospitals.

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Specialist heart, chest and cancer services must be reinstated at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, along with promised upgrades of the emergency and outpatients departments, and a new build for rehabilitation. Overloaded services at Flinders Medical Centre, and long waiting lists for elective surgery will need to be decanted into a revitalised health care campus on the Repat site.

EPAS was purchased 10 years ago and introduced into the public hospital system in 2014. Now, four years and $500 million later it is yet to reach full functionality in only three of our six metropolitan hospitals. EPAS is outdated, cumbersome, counter-intuitive, and slows patient throughput in busy clinical areas by up to 30 per cent.

The irreversible commitment to this flawed system by bureaucrats and IT specialists in SA Health has defied years of wasted time, money and effort.

The recently announced independent review of EPAS is timely, but it begs the question that there have been cheaper and more efficient systems available for many years.

But at least we will know whether EPAS can be salvaged or needs to be abandoned and replaced.

“The problems inherent in the new RAH seem almost insurmountable,” Warren Jones writes. Picture: Matt Turner

The problems inherent in the new RAH seem almost insurmountable. This luxury hotel, masquerading as a general hospital will distort the finances and functioning of our health system for decades. It will take 30 years and $11.9 billon before it is owned by the people of South Australia.

The new RAH is too big, too expensive and in the wrong place. For a fraction of its cost, a more conveniently located and smaller hospital would have served a more valuable purpose in the CBD. Extra funding, beds and other resources could then have been invested in needy metropolitan hospitals.

The Government must work responsibly and prudently to decentralise the administrative and clinical resources in SA Health and to restore balance and equity to our public hospital system.

EMERITUS PROFESSOR WARREN JONES IS THE FORMER HEAD OF OBSTERICS AND GYNAECOLOGY AT FLINDERS MEDICAL CENTRE. HE HAS BEEN A VOCAL CRITIC OF THE TRANSFORMING HEALTH PROGRAM.