Alleged murder of Julie Seed highlights another deadly side to SA’s ramping crisis

People with mental health issues are clogging up emergency departments – often for days – SA’s health minister has admitted.

• Ambos v nurses in ramping crisis

The lack of mental health beds across the state’s embattled hospital and health system is contributing to ambulance ramping rate blow-outs and slower response times.

But the delivery of 44 new beds at Modbury Hospital is the first step the state government hopes will improve health outcomes for South Australians.

Health Minister Chris Picton said the new precinct for Modbury Hospital was among a raft of measures the government was implementing to improve patient outcomes and response times.

The Advertiser revealed on Sunday that elective surgery queues have blown out to more than 20,000 cases as hospitals struggle to deal with record ramping.

Mr Picton said a “huge contributor” to bed block in hospitals and ambulance ramping was the availability of mental health beds.

“We know that people having mental health conditions can get stuck in EDs often for days which obviously is an awful outcome for people experiencing mental health distress,” he said.

“But it is also a bad outcome for the system as a whole because we need those people coming through the system.”

It comes as the government faces community outrage in the wake of Plympton real estate agent Julie Seed’s alleged murder in December.

Julie ‘Julez’ Seed. Picture: Supplied by family via SAPOL

Shaun Michaels Dunk was charged with murder over the mother-of-two’s death, and the alleged attempted murder of her co-worker Susan Scardigno, at the pair’s office on Lydia St.

Mr Picton said the case was “very serious and very concerning to the whole community”.

He said a review was under way into the care Mr Dunk received in the days before the alleged murder.

That report will be made public.

But it highlighted the need for more mental health services across South Australia.

Mr Picton said the mental health system was at its current capacity.

“We definitely need the ability for people to have longer stays in hospital and we’re using every single bed every single day in our mental health system at the moment,” he said.

“That means extra pressure on our emergency department, extra pressure on other services.

“And that’s why, not just here but hospitals right across the city and the state, we’re expanding mental health deliberately because it had a huge impact on those people who need care but impact on the broader community as well.”

The 20,814 cases in the elective surgery queues 4051 listed as overdue and follows cancellations of non-urgent overnight stay surgeries last month to free beds to deal with ramping.

The elective surgery queue last topped 20,000 cases in January 2021 as the pandemic caused cancellations, but was well under this figure during 2023.

Ramping hit a record 4285 hours in November but dipped to 3595 in December, the same month that a disabled man known as Eddie, 54, died after a 10-hour wait for an ambulance at Hectorville.

Safe Haven peer practice lead Kat Eslby said the model of care offered at the new Modbury Hospital mental health precinct was heavily influenced by people such as them with lived and living mental health experience.

“This is vital to create services that will really appropriately meet our needs,” they said.

“All of us have the potential to have (need to access) services like this.

“Having them more freely available can reduce those horrible stories you hear about people in deep distress sitting in emergency departments for days and days at a time, gradually struggling more and more and not being able to access services because there simply aren’t enough of them available.”

Mr Picton said the health system was interconnected and creating more hospital beds would help reduce elective surgery wait times and ambulance ramping.

But he warned it would take time.

He said SA Health had a long-standing and “uncontroversial” policy that if two patients presented to hospital through either the emergency department or via ambulance, there was a policy to treat the ambulance arrival first “when it is appropriate to do so”.

He said that would return the ambulance to service in the community.

Opposition leader David Speirs called for Mr Picton to resign as health minister, saying the system was in crisis and “we’ve got a minister who has lost control”.

Mr Speirs said the Liberal party would release “plenty of health policies between now and the next election”.

“We didn’t have a single Labor health policy until just before the 2022 election,” he said.

Mr Picton said he would not resign, and called out the Opposition’s lack of policy details to date.