Page 5290 - Week 17 - Thursday, 13 December 1990
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Plenty of examples have been publicised of professionals protecting their own within the system. This sort of legislation tends to offer that sort of protection, and we really need to ensure that the public is confident that the legislation passed by this Assembly is not so protectionist of perceived conspiracies within our hospital system. As I have said, patient confidentiality has to be preserved, and it has to be done in a modern way; but we have to ensure that those awful mistakes that have been made and reported, involving health professionals in hospital systems, cannot in any way be covered up. We have to ensure that malpractice within our hospital systems cannot be covered up by these sorts of secrecy provisions. Everybody can conjure up in their own minds the consequences of covering up those sorts of malpractices. There are people who have been injured within hospital systems and, dare I say it, are no longer in this world because of things that have gone wrong in hospital systems. It is a matter of fact that people will continue to die in our hospitals. That is the very nature of them. But what we have to ensure is that the public has the utmost confidence in the services that are being delivered and it has the utmost confidence that any malpractice will be uncovered.
I say to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the public does not have that utmost confidence right now, and these secrecy provisions will do nothing to ensure that the public confidence will be improved. I say to the Minister that there is a need to develop a more modern approach to this whole question. There is a need for the protection of confidential information about individual patients, but there is also a need for provisions which allow important information to be released to ensure that there is confidence within the community about the services which are delivered in our hospital system. I think this legislation presents an opportunity for the Government to give a commitment that it will examine the case for change in these sorts of provisions. I do not seek to make any political points about the issue. It is something that has been uncovered, and it is a matter of concern to the Australian Labor Party.
MR MOORE (10.11): It seems to me that the issues that Mr Berry has raised are very important issues in terms of open government. What we have is a situation where, of course, people are concerned about the confidentiality of personal files. It is quite appropriate that they should be, and it is quite appropriate that the legislation should provide their protection; but what we have here is a Government which has made its announcement about a health board and decided that it had better get to and whip up the legislation as quickly as it could without proper consideration, and this is where we run into this sort of problem. The process that was followed was totally inadequate. The result of the process is that the powers are much broader, I am sure, than the Minister ever intended. They are so broad as to provide almost Gestapo-like powers to the members of the board as far as
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