Queen Elizabeth Hospital emergency alerts hit four-year high

Freedom of Information documents have exposed a four-year high in emergency alerts at Adelaide’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

From 2022 to 2025, the number of Code Black alerts, triggered by hospital staff when they feel their own safety or that of others within the building is at risk, rose from 831 to 1542 at the QEH.

The 86 per cent increase comes as yearly Code Yellow declarations at the Woodville hospital more than doubled from 14 to 40 over the same period.

The government and Opposition traded barbs over definitions of a Code Yellow declaration, with the Liberal’s defining it as “when a hospital has declared an internal emergency and every ward is over capacity or under stress”.

However, a state government spokeswoman said Code Yellow’s referred to “incidents that affect critical hospital infrastructure and other internal emergencies including power loss, hazardous substance spills and computer network failure”.

Speaking on Sunday while Minister for Health and Wellbeing Blair Boyer was on leave, Housing Minister Nick Champion said “city hospital” emergency departments, as part of the Central Adelaide Local Health Network (CALHN), often attracted “difficult incidents”.

“We know often it’s caused by mental illness or by drug use or by other complexities … but we want to see these situations decline,” Mr Champion said.

“Obviously, we don’t want to see disruptive or violent behaviour in EDs.”

Mr Champion said the government was doing “everything we can to give resources to CAHLN” to deal with Code Black incidents.

Shadow Minister for Health and Wellbeing Jack Batty said every Code Black “represents a situation where staff or patients have felt unsafe”.

“At the same time Code Blacks are rising, we’re also seeing more Code Yellows being declared because the hospital is under pressure,” Mr Batty said.

“Those trends should not be viewed in isolation.

“When hospitals are operating under sustained strain, staff are stretched, emergency departments become more crowded and frontline workers are forced to manage increasingly difficult situations.

“(They) deserve a safe workplace, backed by a health system that isn’t constantly operating under pressure.”

Meanwhile, patients presenting to the network for mental health concerns had “steadily” increased at both the QEH and the Royal Adelaide Hospital since 2022, a state government spokeswoman said.

“The Queen Elizabeth Hospital has seen a 39 per cent reduction in ramping hours despite an increase of 9.2 per cent in the number of patients presenting to emergency departments,” she said.

She said the QEH ramping hours declined from 3655 to 2228 over the past 12 months following the introduction of a network-wide model that involved 3400 staff members attending 320 meetings to discuss patient outcomes and identify emerging issues.