Page 389 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 7 March 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
At phase 3 patients waiting for admission to the hospital would be moved to an appropriate ward space to be cared for by ward staff until a bed was available.
Phase 4 would see the activation of the hospital’s internal disaster plan to mobilise additional resources.
What we are now left with is pretty much our current management plan. Two parts trying to run an ED with effectively no beds and one part crossing our fingers that nobody dies from the resulting mess.
So much for the involvement of the hospital staff, Mr Corbell! They seem to be ignored again. That is the problem. They are fine words, but when they get to the management or to the ministerial office, they are knocked on the head. Mr Corbell is not listening to the staff. We had the charade of Mr Corbell saying, “We have consulted with 600 staff.” But there in black and white at impactednurse.com is the true story of what happened. Yes, they were asked and yes, they were ignored.
In an article in the Medical Journal of Australia Dr Drew Richardson says:
The magnitude of the association is around 13 excess in-hospital deaths annually, similar to the number of people killed on the roads in the ACT.
Yes, Dr Richardson did agree with the minister that it was not a causal study, but he also said—and the minister did not mention this—that it is not drawing a long bow to say that overcrowding of the ED caused these deaths. Dr Richardson went on to say:
If replicated in other studies, this association represents a significant public health issue.
I note that the results have been replicated already in Western Australia. So we have, by definition, a significant public health issue.
The problems with access block are well known. However, the government chose to ignore them until the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine, in their letter of 2004, said they could not guarantee patient safety. This report reveals that they were right. Just last week Mr Corbell launched the second phase of what he calls the ACT access health improvement program, but it is actually the third step, While Mr Corbell was away in August 2004, Mr Wood ordered the department to make changes and fix the problem. Since then we have had Mr Corbell’s version of progress.
Just last week Mr Corbell launched the third attempt by the government to address access block. Interestingly, in his media release celebrating the launch of the ACT health access improvement program, he seems to indicate that the triage system has not been safe or timely. It is also interesting that this latest attempt has got another long and important sounding name—the ACT health access improvement program.
I think from that we can formulate a new law. It is Corbell’s law of crisis management: the larger the crisis, the longer the time of the strategy to conceal its needs. The media release celebrating the ACT health access improvement program has the minister sternly advising the community, “Now comes the really hard part—taking up these opportunities
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .