Huge jump in overdue surgeries despite new $2.3 billion hospital raise fears for Christmas

EXTRA doctors are being employed over Christmas in a bid to reduce elective surgery waiting lists in Adelaide’s new $2.3 billion hospital.

• Surge in patients overflows South Australian hospitals
• Ambulance ramping at new RAH two days after opening

OVERDUE elective surgeries have almost quadrupled in the past five months, raising questions about the ability of South Australia’s new $2.3 billion Royal Adelaide Hospital to cope with demand.

New SA Health data shows there are 1483 elective patients in South Australia who should have already had surgery — a sharp increase from about 360 in July and almost four times higher than this time last year.

Central Adelaide Local Health Network chief executive Jenny Richter and Health Minister Peter Malinauskas have vowed that work is underway to reduce the waiting lists.

Analysis from SA health shows that about 63 per cent of overdue elective surgery is at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Flinders Medical Centre has about 11.5 per cent of the state’s total overdue elective surgeries.

The number of overdue elective surgery patients ranged from 289 in July to 626 in March during 2016-17.

Health Minister Peter Malinauskas has vowed that steps are being taken to reduce the waiting lists.

“We’ve been very upfront with the public that the one-in-200 year move to the new site of the Royal Adelaide Hospital meant that we would need to put a number of strategies in place to reduce our elective surgery waiting lists,” Ms Richer said.

“Now that we have settled in, we need to catch up, so we are bringing on more anaesthetists, doing extra surgeries each day and over the past couple of weeks we have started to make some good inroads.

“I would like to acknowledge the dedication and hard work of our doctors, nurses and all staff during a very busy year and also reaffirm to our patients that we are doing everything we can to ensure they receive their elective surgery as soon as possible.”

Opposition health spokesman Stephen Wade said the “massive blow out” in elective surgery waiting times showed the effect of not engaging clinicians in the design and implementation of the hospital.

Questions are being asked about the growing surgery list and why the new hospital hasn’t solved it.

“Three months after the new Royal Adelaide Hospital opened, it is now clear that the problems in the hospital are deep-seated — these are not teething problems,” Mr Wade said.

“It beggars belief that Labor can spend $2.3 billion on a new hospital and then provide less care to patients in need.”

Mr Malinauskas said elective surgeries will be ramped up over the Christmas period.

“Now that we have got the hospital fully up and running we are working incredibly hard to reduce elective surgery waiting lists including employing additional doctors from the private system and anaesthetists who will be working through Christmas as we try and work the list down,” he said.

“We made a deliberate decision to ensure we were ramping the surgery up over a period of time. In the first week or month of the hospital you don’t have it fully operational.

“Now we have been in the hospital for a number of months we have the capacity to ramp up elective surgeries ... and we are employing extra doctors to do that.”