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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2020 ..
MR MOORE (continuing):
In fact, this surgeon aired his view on theatre inefficiencies to the Assembly's health committee, which reported on elective surgery waiting lists last September. The committee recommended that theatre utilisation systems be reviewed, and the government agreed to this recommendation. We have over recent months sought and obtained a team of experienced reformers to undertake that review, and it is a great irony that the announcement of their selection came almost simultaneously with the allegations of Dr Jeans. Mr Deputy Speaker, we were certainly not sitting on our hands.
I draw members' attention to the fact that I have removed the names of people from the material that has been circulated for the protection of those people, and also the exact date in April on which the person died so that the person cannot be identified. I have not looked at the originals with the names on them. If members feel the need to look at them, I think that we could allow them to do so on a one-to-one basis. I do not want them to be publicly available.
Turning to the individual death which Dr Jeans used in his allegations, it is now clear that his claims receive no support from an examination of the facts. The report of the death review committee into this incident concludes as follows:
The patient's prognosis determined from clinical examination by the resident medical staff...at 1030 hours was extremely poor...[There was] a predicted mortality of 100% in this particular patient.
There was no specific cause identified for the time taken to transfer the patient to theatre...It was the result of a series of delays relating to communication between the doctors involved and the desire to resuscitate the patient prior to going to theatre to allow for the optimum chance of the patient starting the operation.
There was no evidence that availability or accessibility to theatre was the cause for the apparent delay in starting the operation.
In addition to those comments in the executive summary, the detailed account that I am tabling today contains the following comment:
The Committee agrees that...processes were in place to enable immediate surgery on this patient. The patient's critical condition and the need for resuscitation were partly responsible for the delay. It was felt that the problems with communication would have been improved if discussion were face to face rather than by phone.
These conclusions need no elaboration from me.
Many interested commentators persist in overlooking the series of increases this government has made to the hospital's funding and call for yet further investment of public money. In particular, leading members of the unions representing nursing and medical staff have made it very plain that they are engaging in a campaign to that end.
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