Page106 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 2 December 2020
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Tellingly, he said that the long hours are not even the biggest issue but that the bullying and harsh treatment by senior clinicians wears them down. He said that if it happened now and then he could manage, but it happens on a regular basis and it becomes very personal and difficult to go on. I asked him if it was what he expected when he was going through university. He told me his teachers at the uni were very kind and were keen to see them do well but that here in the hospital the culture is quite different and, no, it is not what he expected when he was studying.
Occupational health and safety standards on bullying are very well understood. Despite having established that there is an ongoing cultural problem in the hospital with how the various levels of medical, nursing and managerial staff are treated, I fear this will only continue over the next four years. Every single time the issue of culture and staff treatment is raised, there is a begrudging unwillingness to be open and honest about the problem that we have and about how, precisely, it will be altered.
Cultural change is hard; nobody thinks any differently. However, in this case it is absolutely necessary. It is cruel and negligent not to give the staff genuine hope, backed up by very clear and strong action that makes them believe, even after so many years of the problems going on, that this minister and this government will do something to make it stop.
Each and every one in our health system matters to me. Every trainee and junior doctor matters to me. Every nurse, every doctor, every medical physician, administrators, cleaners and patients—all matter to me. They are each to be treated with the dignity and respect that they are entitled to. In a society in which we believe we are born equal, just because someone is young or inexperienced or has done something a supervisor does not like does not mean that this basic dignity can be brushed away.
And even if staff do not jump up and down, asking for proper rest and recuperation, we owe it to them to have the proper systems in place to better manage their fatigue, burnout and exhaustion. We owe it to the patients and to the families of staff and patients in our health system.
Instead of continuing to be worse than the average, for a change how about the minister coming in here and showing us her plans and the directorate’s plans coming out of her office to make our health system above average, or the best in Australia, or better than other peer hospitals? We are waiting for a vision for a future in health for workers where they can have some hope that things will actually improve. Anything less constitutes ongoing negligence, the consequences of which are devastating to individual medical personnel as well as those they care for.
I call on the government to come here with a comprehensive plan to actually adhere to the enterprise agreement and to tackle the rampant burnout and exhaustion, and I call on them to report back to the Assembly on the progress of these actions each year and to explain precisely how junior doctor burnout and exhaustion is being reduced.
I commend my motion to the Assembly.
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