South Australia’s new premier has been challenged over a “secret hospital surgery ban” after raising explosive claims.
Peter Malinauskus on Tuesday claimed health officials quietly reimposed a ban on non-urgent elective surgeries on the eve of the state election because the state’s hospitals were under pressure.
Mr Malinauskas said the ban on non-urgent elective surgeries in public hospitals was signed off on Friday, the day before the Liberal Party’s landslide loss to Labor.
Mr Malinauskas took a swipe at his predecessor Steven Marshall and his government for reinstating the ban, saying they had left the hospital system under “extraordinary strain”.
“There is a lot of demand on hospital capacity at the moment, so much so that I can reveal today that on Friday last week, a decision was taken to ban all non-urgent overnight elective surgery in our public hospitals,” he told reporters.
“I’ll say that again. On Friday last week, a decision was taken to reinstate a ban on all non-urgent elective surgery, overnight elective surgery in public hospitals.
“So things are so bad in our public hospital system that the elective surgeries that were put back on are being cancelled again.”
Former health minister Stephen Wade said he was not made aware that elective surgeries had been suspended on Friday.
It came after the boss of SA Health said he “took the policy of minimising any controversial announcements during caretaker mode”.
SA Health sought to clarify the situation on Tuesday night.
“Last week saw consistent high demand on the health system,” a spokeswoman said.
“Local health networks were advised they could cancel elective surgery if required to help manage demand and create more bed capacity.”
SA Health said in the week leading up to March 19xjmtzyw, nine elective procedures were postponed across metropolitan hospitals.
“Hospitals also implemented other measures such as converting some overnight surgeries to day surgeries to help free up capacity,” the spokeswoman said.
“Since then, we’ve postponed an additional six elective surgeries across metropolitan hospitals.”
Mr Malinauskas campaigned hard on hospital and ambulance ramping issues before his decisive victory, leading to accusations from some Liberals that he had run a scare campaign.
Mr Malinauskas unveiled new health measures on Tuesday after the state recorded 3686 new Covid-19 infections, taking the total number of active cases to 29,150.
He said he was working to bring the state’s restrictions into line with national standards and to urgently increase hospital capacity ahead of a predicted increase in Covid-19 cases.
SA has remained somewhat of an outlier in its tough isolation rules for close contacts that require people to quarantine for seven to 14 days depending on their circumstances.
Mr Malinauskas said his “suspicions” had been confirmed that the reason SA had tougher restrictions was because its hospital system was under “extraordinary strain”.
“So if you want to know why we’ve got different arrangements in South Australia, that has been an informing consideration that has no doubt helped inform the judgment of the state co-ordinator in making relative decisions,” he said.
He said the SA Health chief executive officer had told him the last week had been one of the toughest weeks the state had ever experienced in regards to hospital pressure.
During its targeted state election campaign on healthcare, Labor was ordered to remove an election advertisement about ambulance ramping that was found to have breached the Electoral Act because it was “inaccurate and misleading”.
