Page 4475 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 23 November 2005
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Consequently, we need to look for systemic ways of managing problems sooner rather than later and to set up resilient procedures to assist people in reporting their concerns.
Hospitals are learning more about dealing with failure than are many other organisations, which might be because the consequences can be so stark. So we can learn from them. It is now well accepted that hospitals need to be learning organisations and systems need to be put in place to deal with adverse events—not so that they rebound on staff involved in those events, or on their insurance policies, but so that the hospital can continually improve in delivering its service.
Many public organisations, however, are not set up to learn from internal failures. One institution that has had its share of catastrophic failure recently has been the commonwealth department of immigration. It is hard to know how much the individual outcomes are the consequence of internal failure or the direct result of government policy. Too often governments take the easy way out by scapegoating individuals and refusing to examine the culture, which is more diffuse and harder to identify. I understand why rebranding the department of immigration to say that its business is people makes some sense, at least in addressing problems with the vision thing. More practical strategies, however, do not appear to be in place. I do not believe, for example, that there is yet any system in place in DIMIA that would allow officers to easily raise matters of concern regarding particular actions they or others in the department were taking, such as impacting on the human rights of clients. This is a concern that would also apply for health services such as the ADP. Raising matters of such sensitivity is probably very difficult for officers in DIMIA, but it ought to be exactly the kind of information that is welcomed.
It is self-evident that, if agencies do not put systems in place to acknowledge criticism and failure and to respond positively to concerns when they are raised at all levels of operation, the operation of the agencies and the health of their staff will be compromised. In a complex, demanding area of work such as alcohol and drug services that is doubly so. I believe that some of the measures evident in the ADP action plan that emerged in response to the three reviews can give us some extra confidence; but the unresolved question is one of oversight.
I note that the ACT government has recently conducted a review of the Public Interest Disclosure Act, although this review has not yet been released. The PID act is our legislative backup when it comes to integrity in operations, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of this exercise. I am aware from the ombudsman’s annual report that there are difficulties for agencies with carriage of public interest disclosures in separating matters of internal dispute and procedure from those of greater public interest significance.
It seems to me that either we look to make PID processes more resilient and give investigating agencies better resources to explore disclosures or we ensure that all agencies, in addition to complying with the PID act, have more accessible systems designed for staff to raise questions of policy and procedure. That is why for the ADP the detail of so many of the recommendations from both the clinical governance and workplace environment reviews is critical, because they are proposing more effective feedback and accountability systems.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .