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Health
Nick Harmsen and Isabel Dayman

Two more senior SA Health bureaucrats quit

Another two senior SA Health bureaucrats have quit, continuing a revolving door at the helm of South Australia's public hospital network.

Women's and Children's Health Network chief executive Naomi Dwyer will depart next month to run a hospital network in Queensland.

Southern Adelaide Local Health Network Chief Professor Mike O'Keefe will retire and return to Canada when his contract expires on November 10.

The resignations of two of the state's five Health Network chiefs come soon after the resignations of a Health Minister, Jack Snelling, and a Mental Health Minister, Leesa Vlahos.

They continue a pattern of rapid turnover in the Health bureaucracy, which SA Health chief executive Vicki Kaminski blamed in part on "poor recruiting" and a "failure to appropriately develop talent from within South Australia".

Earlier this year the Australian Medical Association said that SA Health needed to "have a good hard look at itself" to understand why this was happening.

It said the situation was very unsettling for medical, nursing, allied health professionals and the public.

The 'revolving door'

Professor O'Keefe was only recruited to lead the Flinders Medical Centre, Repatriation General Hospital and Noarlunga Hospital in the middle of last year.

He was recruited from Eastern Health in Canada, where he had worked with Ms Kaminski.

Ms Dwyer was recruited to run the Women's and Children's Hospital from Gold Coast Health in 2014.

The chief executive of the Central Adelaide Local Health Network, Jenny Richter, was lured out of retirement earlier this year to oversee the transition to the New Royal Adelaide Hospital after another senior executive, Len Richards, quit just two months into the job.

Mr Richards had been appointed in February to take over from former CEO Julia Squire, who was sacked.

The Department's chief executive, Vickie Kaminski, initially accepted her position on an interim basis upon the resignation of former SA Health chief executive David Swan.

At the time, Ms Kaminski stated she had no interest in remaining in the position permanently.

Resignations described as 'disturbing' and 'turmoil'

The South Australian Opposition's health spokesman, Stephen Wade, described the latest resignations as "disturbing".

"The organisation is struggling to cope with the disaster of Transforming Health and here we are, coming into the last few months of this parliament, and SA Health loses yet another pair of key leaders," he said.

"Mike O'Keefe is responsible for the Southern Local Health Network [and] in a matter of weeks the Repat Hospital is going to close and there are crisis talks this week about [hospital] overloading in the south.

"This is yet another example of SA Health being in turmoil...It's disturbing [and] it shows that the health leadership has completely lost confidence in this government's capacity to [manage health]."

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