CORONAVIRUS — MEDIHOTELS
32. Ms L. METTAM to the Minister for Health:
Is the minister aware that South
Australia uses medihotels with purpose-built ventilation systems to house COVID
patients, and can the minister confirm that his failure to complete the
construction of the three medihotels that he promised at the 2017 election
means that the Western Australian public is at greater risk of COVID outbreaks
and snap lockdowns?
Mr R.H. COOK replied:
The medihotels in Western Australia
are for patients, predominately country and regional patients, who are coming into our hospital system or who are not yet ready
to leave but have an opportunity to convalesce in a more appropriate care environment. They are not in any way related
to our COVID-19 response. They are completely different things. They
share the same name, but that is South Australia's prerogative to call
its COVID-19 facility medihotels; we choose to use them for a different purpose.
In relation to medihotels, we have one functioning at the moment at Royal Perth
Hospital, and it is going very well. A lot of country patients are really
appreciating the opportunity to be able to use it when either coming in or
going out on their patient journey, and it has been very successful. At the
moment we are developing another big one at Fiona Stanley Hospital. That has
taken longer than we wanted. That is being done in partnership with property
developers down there and with private healthcare providers in a hybrid model
that will produce some great outcomes, but has caused a delay.
Medihotels
are used differently in Western Australia from South Australia. What South
Australia refers to as its medihotels are used for what might be called
COVID-positive passengers. South Australia places all its COVID-positive people
in that particular facility. That has not been the approach that we have had in
the past. The Chief Health Officer in the past has made it very clear that
every time a COVID-positive person is moved, it represents a risk. Let us say
we have a COVID-positive person at one of our hotels and we wanted to move them
from one hotel to another hotel. That would
require us to take that person through the hotel, exposing the person to
the staff and other people in the facility. They would then have to be put in
an ambulance, exposing the ambulance crew to that person, and then they would
have to be taken to the new facility. Again, that is another transfer. The best
option always has been to leave someone in the room in which they are in so
that they can resolve their disease and, ultimately, leave the hotel unable to
transmit it. That is the advice that we have had in the past. I noticed, for
instance, that Queensland takes a different approach. It transfers all positive
COVID-19 patients into a hospital. That led to an outbreak. We are not
particularly in favour of that approach either. It also uses up important
hospital beds. But these are all questions that continue to be examined and
re-examined as we go through the process of making sure that we have constant
improvement of the processes around our management of COVID-19.
There is, of course, a better
solution, one proposed by the Premier, and that is that the commonwealth
government accepts its role under the Constitution to take care of quarantining
facilities, which it has always done historically and which it did in the case
of the people who were evacuated from China and Japan. A myth is being
perpetuated by some in the media and elsewhere that the state governments
stepped up and took on this role; we did not. We took on the role because
initially we needed a public health response to those people who needed to
isolate away from vulnerable relatives. That is the reason that we went into
the hotel quarantine business. We have since, by virtue of the commonwealth's
lack of action, had to go into this other process of actually looking after
quarantining international arrivals, which,
unsurprisingly, is covered under the Constitution as a commonwealth
responsibility. It is what it is. We will do the best that we can. But the last
thing we need is a commonwealth government that continues to critique the
states from the sidelines. The last thing we need is an opposition that
continues to undertake guerilla political tactics to criticise. We need people
to stick together and acknowledge that over 45 000 people have come through our
hotel quarantine system, with five incidents. They are doing a great job under
difficult circumstances in a non-fit-for-purpose facility in an imperfect
world. They are doing a great job. We stand by them and thank them for their
commitment to working in difficult circumstances. We should all be very proud
of what they have done.