Page 2297 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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(c) urgently investigate all matters raised in this motion and report back to the Assembly by the last sitting day in November 2007.
First, I apologise for a typographical error in the wording of the motion. It should read “Australian Nursing Federation” not “Australian Nurses Federation”.
We know we have a problem when even federal Labor can see there are some major problems with our health system across Australia—all managed, incidentally, by Labor governments. Unfortunately, throwing more money at the states and territories—and let us face it: $2 billion is not exactly big bickies in health—will not solve anything because what federal Labor will not acknowledge is that the failure is systemic mismanagement, inefficiency and waste by the states and territories.
The issue came to a head recently when the Australian Nursing Federation voiced its concerns about the quality of care being compromised because nurses are overstretched. This is what the ANF said in their release of 30 July after the biennial conference of AMF delegates:
ACT nurses attending the ANF ACT Branch Biennial Conference on Friday 27 July resolved that it has become essential to notify the ACT community that staffing levels in the public and private health sectors cannot sustain the work demands on health services and that nurses are concerned that standards of care may be compromised and need to alert the community of this genuine concern.
The health minister put out a line of spin, of course, maintaining that the problems at the ACT’s public hospitals were all to do with a bad flu season, which meant more patients presenting and more nursing staff off sick. But this had the opposite effect to that intended, because many nurses working in the ACT public system were incensed by this misrepresentation of the true situation at our hospitals. They and families of patients who have recently been treated or who, in some cases, gave up after waiting for hours and hours, rang me to tell me an entirely different story. Nurses told me that blaming the hospitals’ problems on a flu season was simply laughable. Winter ills are pretty predictable and good management should be able to deal with that. The issue snowballed as more and more nurses contacted the opposition to raise a range of concerns about the lack of basic supplies and equipment readily available to nursing staff and problems with management of staff.
Let us turn to equipment and supplies. Over recent weeks the opposition has been told that the ACT public hospital system is struggling to provide basic supplies such as dressings and intravenous tubing, heavy lifting equipment, chemo drugs and icy poles for post-chemo treatment. Where these items have been available, they have been in very limited supply, forcing already stretched nurses to run from ward to ward in search of these supplies.
What was the health minister’s response? She said the hospital stockpiled these items. Well, that is the principle but not the practice, according to both nurses and patients’ families. The ANF instructed nurses to fill in critical shortage alerts where appropriate. The form states:
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