Page 4565 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 14 December 1993
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Mrs Carnell: But not mine?
MR BERRY: I accept your warm congratulations on the matter too, Mrs Carnell, but I do not accept your criticisms about the other complaints units. I accept Ms Szuty's warm support for this motion, but I do not accept her criticism about the consultation process.
Dealing with each of them in turn, Mrs Carnell raised the issue of having duplication in terms of complaints routes, if I can call them that, in the health system. There will always be quality control measures within the health system, private and public - even in the individual practitioner's place of work - that deal with complaints as a quality control measure. ACT Health will always have a complaints mechanism within it, and it will deal with complainants with a view to satisfying them. It will work very hard to make sure that complaints do not end up with the commissioner who is the subject of this legislation. It would be a major criticism of the system if complaints had to be referred to the commissioner. We will always have that mechanism. Mrs Carnell can rest assured that, where there is any unnecessary area of what might be described as duplication, it will be attended to. We know her concerns. I think she has made some complaints publicly about the issue. It is not a big issue; we know about it. There will always be complaints mechanisms - there have to be - in both the public sector and the private sector.
In terms of Ms Szuty's complaints about consultation, it was a long consultation process because the Government was particularly concerned that we should take the community with us on this score. I think it was over a year ago that we had our first public meeting. There were a couple of those, as I recall. The officer who has worked diligently on this matter contacted people who were at those public meetings, with a view to ensuring that all of the concerns at least were taken into account on the way. That certainly was done. I know that Ms Szuty was not provided with an outline of the written submissions that were made to the Government. That was as it will always be, because they were submissions that were made to the Government and there were privacy issues involved. In my view, it would have been a breach of faith, in effect, to have made those documents public.
It was always open to individuals within this Assembly to refer the matter to some committee at any time along the way. I am not sure that it would have helped the process, but it might have. It was not something that concerned me along the way. If committees recognise that there is a genuine consultation process going on in good faith as a result of Government action on particular legislation, they ought not be concerned about it, because the views of people who participate in the process will be taken into account. If there are complaints about particular legislation, the complainants would contact individual members - those who had strong feelings about it anyway. That has happened in the past with legislation that people have resisted.
The purpose of this Bill is to provide for the oversight, review and improvement of public and private health services by establishing an accessible independent facility that will receive and resolve health service complaints. People have gone over many of these points, but I should go over them again because they are very important. It will facilitate contributions by users and providers to the review and improvement of health services; it will preserve and promote the health rights of users of public and private health services; and it will provide education
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