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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (17 April) . . Page.. 980 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

A second investigation is already under way. As I said, an officer from the fraud prevention unit of the Office of Public Administration was appointed more than a week ago now to conduct a full inquiry into these allegations. I would also state that it is not appropriate for me to detail these allegations at this time. The ones that were forwarded to a few of us, I suspect, were not signed, and it would be inappropriate for unsigned, unsubstantiated allegations to be spoken about in this place when at this stage we are not sure just how much credibility they have.

There is a third inquiry in place. The Clinical Privileges Committee has also requested information from the doctors involved and is considering the implications of this action. A special meeting was called on 24 April. This committee considers matters relating to practice standards and ethics. Quite seriously, if Mr Berry believes that our Clinical Privileges Committee, which looks at ethics and all of those sorts of things within our hospital, does not take that job extremely seriously - - -

Mr Berry: Do you believe it?

MRS CARNELL: Yes, I do. The Clinical Privileges Committee does an extremely good job at Woden. It looks at issues that are certainly not always in the best interests of the medical profession - in fact, regularly are not - and it does that very professionally. Finally, the ACT Medical Board is now undertaking an independent inquiry to consider the implications of these actions by medical staff at Woden Valley Hospital in regard to their fitness to practise and any other necessary disciplinary action. There are four inquiries, all from different angles, certainly. All of those inquiries, I believe, are independent. At least two of them are totally separate from the hospital, and one could say that the Medical Board is at arm's length from the hospital too.

I think we have to return now to the absolute hypocrisy that Mr Berry has shown here today. If Mr Berry were serious about looking at this issue, and if he believed that somehow the four inquiries we have currently put in place were not sufficient to get to the bottom of this issue, why do we not go to an inquiry by the Commissioner for Health Complaints - another independent body that we have available in this city to look at exactly these sorts of issues? I do not believe that we need to go to the Health Complaints Commissioner at this stage; but I have no problems in the world with sending all of the information pertaining to these allegations to the commissioner, who I believe is doing an extremely good job and is doing it at arm's length both from the ACT Public Service and from the medical profession, whether it be public or private, in this city. I do not think anybody in this place should suggest that the commissioner is in some way biased towards the medical profession. I know that the medical profession do not believe that to be so. If it had happened while Mr Berry was Minister, Mr Speaker, what do you think would have happened? He would have laughed and he would have done what he had always done, and that is bugger all.

In relation to the third point of Mr Berry's motion, I am unclear exactly what Mr Berry is getting at. Possibly Mr Berry would like to sort out what he is talking about in the third paragraph of his motion. The Commonwealth Government provides funding under the Medicare agreement on the basis that the ACT and the other State and Territory governments operate under certain principles. These are, for Mr Berry's information - he should already know; he was Health Minister under four blown-out health budgets -

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