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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 14 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4972 ..

MS TUCKER: I move:

That the report be noted.

As with its inquiry into the 2001-02 annual and financial reports, the committee has in this report raised matters on which it feels that reporting can be improved. The committee recognises the role of annual reports as a key reporting document in the financial cycle. In its previous report on annual and financial reports-Report No 3-the committee discussed the purpose and intent of annual and financial reports and their importance as an accountability document for the government, Assembly and the community.

When the committee looks at annual reports it looks for a well-analysed summary of the outcomes, challenges and achievements of the agency, it looks at the impact of major outside scrutiny on agency business and it looks for clear and concise qualitative links to budget papers and performance measures. This year, ACT Health is a new entity, comprising what were formerly the ACT Health and Community Care Service-the Canberra Hospital and ACT Community Care-and the ACT Department of Health and Community Care, so there is a new structure and there were some hiccups in the annual report in regard to that new structure on which we have made comment. In general, we have made comments, once again, on performance indicators. I will comment particularly on that one.

In recommendation 4 the committee recommended that the government forward the new suite of performance indicators for ACT Health to the Standing Committee on Health when finalised. We raised that with the 2001-02 annual reports. As an example, we mentioned the 100 per cent measure for mental health services maintaining national mental health standard accreditation and at that time the committee recommended that the performance measures be reviewed and that numerical measures be used only where they convey meaningful information.

We were told at that time that ACT Health was reviewing the criteria for performance measures and the government agreed that they needed to be looked at. This issue has not been resolved in this report, although the chief executive of ACT Health told the committee that a suite of performance indicators is currently being developed which will improve the comprehensiveness of reporting. The committee is still of the view that the current numerical performance measures inadequately represent the agency's performance.

As members probably would be aware, other committees of the Assembly also have consistently raised this issue, including select committees on estimates, and we go into some detail in the report to remind the government of this fact and make the point that numerical measures should be used in isolation only when they are self-explanatory, for example, occasions of service or number of bed nights. I think that this is a really important aspect of reporting by agencies and we really do hope that we will see an improvement in the next annual report.

I will not go through all the recommendations, but one other one that I will pick up is the comment we made about how Health was reporting on committee recommendations. As members are aware, the agencies now have a responsibility to report in each annual

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