Ramping headed for 100,000 hours as elective surgery cancelled

Hours lost to ramping since Labor was elected will soon hit the 100,000 mark as elective surgery are cancelled.

The health system faces a winter of discontent as time lost to ambulance ramping under Labor edges towards the 100,000 hours mark, elective surgery is cancelled and a triple whammy of respiratory illnesses on the rise threaten to further clog stressed emergency departments.

SA Health now has cancelled all elective surgery across metropolitan and country hospitals except category 1 and pediatric urgent category 2 as hospitals struggle to cope.

SA Health have cancelled all elective surgery. Picture: NCA NewsWire

After a week of consecutive days of all metropolitan hospitals operating on Code White — EDs treating more people than their capacity — SA Health chief executive Dr Robyn Lawrence said the system is experiencing significant demand.

“To manage the demand, our local hospital networks have opened all available hospital beds, maximised out of hospital care options and paused all elective surgery except Category 1 and Pediatric urgent Category 2 in metropolitan and country hospitals,” she said.

“Many hospitals are also being impacted by the large amount of respiratory illness in our community, in particular Covid and flu, which is also creating staff shortages.

“We currently have more than 140 patients in hospital with Covid and flu, and our metropolitan hospitals have reported around 270 staff currently off sick with Covid.”

As of last month, hours lost to ramping since Labor was elected rose to just under 90,000, with this month’s data due to be released next week.

While the state government now says its core election promise to “fix ramping” means to improve response times, overloaded EDs regularly are full of people treated but waiting for an appropriate room, leaving ambulance arrivals waiting in car parks.

The Advertiser revealed almost 9000 patients waited more than a day in clogged metropolitan EDs for a ward bed last financial year — about 170 patients every week.

Ambulances at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Kelly Barnes

Packed EDs and ramped ambulances reached a crisis prior to Easter which saw some non-urgent elective surgery cases abruptly postponed. The elective list ballooned to hit 20,902 patients listed as ready for surgery with 4050 listed as overdue, and more to come with the latest open-ended “pause.”

Royal Adelaide Hospital. Picture: NCA NewsWire

Adding to pressure is the “triple whammy” of rising cases of flu, Covid and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) even before the cold weather hits.

Covid soared almost 400 cases last week to 1906, in a sharply rising trend this month.

RSV cases have risen to 1970 this year compared to 1704 at the same time last year which went on to record 12,217 cases.

Flu cases have hit 3401 compared to 3727 at the same time last year which went on to be one of the worst in recent times with 22,405 cases.

Hospitals are grappling with a second “triple whammy” — lack of suitable places for mental health, aged care and NDIS patients medically fit for discharge.

Greater Fleurieu Medical Clinic closes.

Further adding to demand on EDs, from July 1 GP clinics will be slugged with state payroll tax which one typical suburban clinic estimates will cost the practice $110,000 a year and “the only way to cover it is to increase fees.”

The government announced it will exempt wages earned by GPs for bulk-billed services. However, a survey by online health care directory cleanbill.com.au found just 81 of 291 GP clinics in Adelaide bulk billed.

Health Minister Chris Picton said: “We are in the process of building hundreds of much needed extra hospital beds. Over the course of this year and next there’s so many new beds coming into the system it is the equivalent of a new QEH.

“We were more quickly able to add extra ambos that led to a big improvement in ambulance response times. Reducing ramping will require more hospital beds and they take longer to build.”

Opposition leader David Speirs said South Australians haven’t forgotten Peter Malinauskas’ number one election commitment was to “fix ramping”.

Tweet of SA Labor saying it will fix ramping in November 2021

“Ramping in South Australia isn’t just slightly worse under Peter Malinauskas – in fact, since he was elected, we’ve endured the 23 worst months of ramping in our state’s history, which is outrageous,” he said. “People are losing their lives because of Peter Malinauskas’ failures and broken promises in health.”