Page 2666 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 21 September 2022
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We cannot wait for an inquest to be held, for recommendations to be made and for considerations of those recommendations before we improve healthcare for our most vulnerable in Canberra, our sick and deteriorating children.
Changes can be made to improve paediatric care today, which would be the most appropriate tribute to Rozalia’s shattered family and the families of the other children who have died in the last two years. A hospital is there to save lives. The government must do everything it can to stop children dying in hospitals.
On 13 July 2017, the Canberra Times ran a story with a headline, “The horror day that robbed a family.” The story marked the 20th anniversary of the Canberra Hospital implosion in 1997 that claimed the life of 12-year-old Katie Bender, killed instantly when she was hit by a piece of flying steel.
Katie’s death rocked Canberra and indeed the nation, and Canberrans have not forgotten. Canberra is a tight-knit community and Canberrans have also been shocked by Rozalia’s death. For Rozalia’s parents, their horror day that robbed a family was 5 July this year—the day mum Katrina saw her only daughter rapidly deteriorate and die before her eyes. Twenty years after Katie Bender’s sudden death, her family said, “Our hearts will always be broken.” That is the same reality now inflicted on the Spadafora family, as well as the grieving mother of 13-year-old Brian Lovelock who died in August.
The coroner who conducted Katie Bender’s inquest, Shane Madden, concluded, “what occurred when Katie Bender was killed was inexcusable.” At the time, Labor opposition leader Jon Stanhope called for the resignation of Chief Minister Kate Carnell, moving a motion of no-confidence in the Assembly.
“It is simply not possible for the government,” Mr Stanhope declared, “or the legislature, to walk away or to stick its head in the sand and say we do not have a major problem of government in the ACT”. Those words of Mr Stanhope’s are apt today, because it is simply not possible for this government—this tired, incompetent government—to walk away or stick its head in the sand and say that we do not have a major problem of government in the ACT. We do. We also have a completely out-of-touch health minister, who has been in the job for more than three years yet failed to fix the catalogue of problems in our health system. In fact, Minister Stephen-Smith has presided over more problems, with the list of failures growing longer on her watch.
Recently there has been media attention on how paediatric emergency care at the Canberra Hospital can be improved. The ACT President of the Australian Medical Association, Professor Walter Abhayaratna, has called on the government to consider changes to its system of monitoring paediatric patients, in particular deteriorating children. That is what today’s motion is about. Professor Abhayaratna has called for the paediatric early warning system, or PEWS as it is called, to be tweaked. Currently it has an aggregate score which determines how often a patient is monitored. A new protocol, Professor Abhayaratna has explained, would allow staff to escalate the care of a paediatric patient based on one factor alone; a single vital sign such as an
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