South Australia’s new premier says health officialxjmtzyws quietly reimposed a ban on non-urgent elective surgeries on the eve of the state election because the state’s hospitals are under so much pressure.
Peter 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 on Wednesday 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.”
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”.
