Page 1068 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 April 1994
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The Minister doesn't allow managers to attempt to manage. Managers are spending more time answering 'ministerials' and not listening to what their staff tell them.
Another unhappy worker in the health system said:
People are always managing under crisis and retrospectively. It is crisis management on a daily basis to stop and quieten political issues - they're patching up all the time.
They are comments from staff working in the system. It is abundantly clear that the Minister, Mr Connolly, has inherited a very serious management problem - in fact, a number of management problems - and that one of his top priorities must be to totally overhaul the administration of Woden Valley Hospital and ACT Health.
Mr Connolly should also revisit the decision to site the hospice on Acton Peninsula. The siting of a hospice on Acton Peninsula is just a patently silly decision; but then we all know that, except Mr Berry. It is the wrong decision for those needing the service, the wrong financial decision and the wrong use of Acton Peninsula. Now is the time to get it right and build the hospice where it will best serve the people who want to use it and their families - that is, in the bushland setting adjacent to Calvary Hospital.
Palliative care is also deteriorating under this Government. Really interesting to me was the number of calls we got from staff working in palliative care, a service that we all know is absolutely essential to the community; yet the calls from the staff are the ones that I think any government should be really concerned about. They show absolutely categorically that they believe that there is no support for their service - a service that they believe is under huge pressure and has already been cut back.
Mr Connolly, you will have to get out there and see the effect of your Government's policies and management failures to be able to even look like addressing the problems. Listen to the health workers, who are sick and tired of making do with less and less and struggling to help their patients while being ignored or criticised for speaking out. Listen to the people who use the deteriorating services and understand why patients are really worried. The Government stands condemned for failing these people.
The poisoned chalice of neglect and mismanagement has now been handed to the new Minister, Mr Connolly. He has certainly inherited a health system in chaos. I doubt whether anyone would argue with that. What can he do, though, to recover the Government's lost credibility in community health services? I have a few tests for the new Minister, and it will be interesting to revisit these in a few months' time. It will be interesting to see whether the new Minister can rein in the health budget, which has blown out, as I have already said, by $5m so far this year. Will it hit $7m, $8m or $9m, as it has always done under Mr Berry, or will this new Minister be able to make a difference? Will he reduce the unconscionably long hospital waiting list? Will we see a reversal of the doubling we have seen under Mr Berry's regime? Will Mr Connolly be able to reopen idle hospital wards? Will he be able to get more beds back into the system? Will there be more money to actually provide services?
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