PERTH CHILDREN'S
HOSPITAL — EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT — CODE YELLOW DECLARATION
419. Dr D.J. HONEY to the Minister for Health:
I
refer to the fact that Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital was in code yellow again
today because it was reportedly short 31 nurses, and follows the code
yellow at Perth Children's Hospital on Saturday. How is it possible that
just five months after Aishwarya Aswath's tragic death, the Perth
Children's Hospital emergency department could be forced into a code
yellow, placing children at risk?
Mr R.H.
COOK replied:
Only the Liberal opposition would
use the tragic passing of a young girl in our hospital to gain rank political opportunity
and bring that issue into this place. The fact of the matter is that our
hospitals are under significant pressure. There is a reason we are getting code
yellows and that is that we have had a post-COVID spike in hospital demand. Perth Children's Hospital is a great
example. We usually receive between 140 and 180 presentations at that hospital's emergency department a day.
Over the weekend, we had 300 presentations. No system can deal with those
shocks to it in relation to demand. Our
health workers are working as hard as they can. The government is committed
to making sure that they have the extra resources they need. We are increasing
the number of beds, expanding the capacity of our EDs and growing the
healthcare workforce, which we talked about last week.
It
is tough in our healthcare system at the moment. Every healthcare system in
Australia is going through tough times at the moment as we see this
post-pandemic spike. As I said last week, groups such as the Royal Australian
College of General Practitioners attribute COVID-19 to this lag of people
getting healthcare attention in 2020 and we are now experiencing some of the effects of that. We are also in the teeth
of the flu season at the moment, with increased presentations of the
respiratory syncytial virus—RSV. People in the health system can be
confident, particularly following our large
$1.9 billion package that we announced last week, that the McGowan government
will stand by our healthcare workers and stand by our patients, making
sure that we put patients first.