Page108 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 2 December 2020
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our health system. Every person in our health system matters to me, as they matter to Mrs Jones.
I reject Mrs Jones’s accusation of a begrudging unwillingness to acknowledge that there are cultural issues across both Canberra Health Services and our ACT public health services more broadly. In fact, we acknowledge this on a regular basis and I report back on a regular basis on the very significant action that the government is taking in response to the independent review into workplace culture within ACT public health services. Therefore, in response to Mrs Jones’s call to report to the Assembly each year on the progress of reducing junior doctor burnout and exhaustion, I am very happy to include reporting in relation to these matters in the broader reporting on the response to the culture review.
I can also advise Mrs Jones that tomorrow a number of reports will be tabled that reflect the partnership with the Australian National University’s Research School of Management to develop the ACT public health system workplace culture framework, providing an evidence-based approach to inform organisation and cultural change. That has been a deliberate investment in a systematic and coordinated approach to improving the people-based aspect of ACT public health services, because we know, as Mrs Jones acknowledged, that sustainable organisational and cultural change takes time.
I want to touch on the comments that were made by Dr Nick Coatsworth when the issue of the particular review was reported in the media. That appears to have prompted this motion. Dr Coatsworth acknowledged that, more broadly in relation to the culture at Canberra Health Services, in the six months that he had been away from Canberra Health Services, and on his return, he had seen an improvement in the culture that was recognisable from his perspective. Obviously some junior doctors, or at least one junior doctor, have responded to that saying that they have not seen that change. This is very unfortunate and we are responding to that.
Specifically in relation to the matters raised in the motion about the physician training program, it is really important to start by recognising that there are almost 600 junior doctors across Canberra Health Services and fewer than 20 at any one time in the physician training program. This particular review of the pass rates for the physician training clinical examination related to a small number of our junior doctors, not the entire junior doctor cohort, which Mrs Jones and others would seem to want to conflate.
It is important also to recognise that the pass rates in emergency medicine, general surgery and pathology are actually very high. Indeed, the pass rate in basic physician training was in line with the national average pass rates until 2017. It was the significant drop in those pass rates in 2018 and 2019 that prompted the commissioning of this specific review in order to understand what was going on.
This is what organisations that take physician training seriously, that take the wellbeing of their staff seriously, do. When they see that something is wrong, they seek to understand what is going on and to address it. That is exactly what Canberra Health Services has done. This review came out with about 54 recommendations all
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