This appeared last week:
Shock resignation of SA Health Minister catches government and healthcare off-guard
Lynne Minion | 19 Sep 2017
Just two weeks after the opening of the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, embattled South Australian Health Minister Jack Snelling has quit cabinet, announcing he will leave parliament at next year’s state election.
Snelling’s resignation was followed hours later by the announcement by Mental Health Minister Leesa Vlahos that she would be stepping down from the ministry for “personal health” reasons.
Both ministers were responsible for the state-run Oakden nursing home, where poor treatment of dementia patients led to the closing down of the facility and an anti-corruption inquiry, which is soon to deliver its report.
Claiming his decision to walk away from politics was due to family reasons, Snelling’s departure from his contentious tenure in the health minister’s role “caught people unawares” in the party, according to Labor Whip Tom Kenyon.
First term MP Peter Malinauskas will move from police and correctional services to take on health and mental health, assuming roles besieged by controversy.
South Australia’s new flagship $2.4 billion hospital opened earlier this month after a decade of controversy, including a 17-month delay, cost blowouts, political infighting and construction fatalities.
The hospital is also the subject of a $185 million lawsuit in the Federal Court, with builders claiming delays in the implementation of the electronic patient records system — EPAS — at the new RAH made it “impossible” for the project to be completed on time.
In Parliament last month, Snelling downplayed the problems with EPAS while conceding paper records would also be used at the new hospital “to make the move as simple for our clinicians as is possible”.
SA Health has been rolling out EPAS across all its public hospitals and healthcare agencies since 2013. More than 2000 staff use it each day and over 1.29 million inpatient, outpatient and emergency department visits have been registered in the system.
But according to the state’s AMA, a survey of medical staff found they viewed the system as “not fit for purpose”.
Pathology mix-ups, prescribing mishaps and trouble finding records when they are urgently needed were some of the problems identified by users of the system in a questionnaire.
Lots more here:
What a saga and an election due in March I believe. It seems the troubles just pile up for SA Health.
David.
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