Page 3649 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 21 November 2007
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the day? We all know they were decisions of the government of the day, so how did the board actually enhance the management of our public hospitals? I table the following documents:
ACT Board of Health—Resignation of chairman—Media articles (3).
(Time expired.)
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.06): I will not be supporting the bill. I am interested in the document that Mr Stanhope read from because it confirms what I have heard by hearsay. It makes it fairly clear that, if we are going to change the way we govern our hospital system, it requires really thorough research which looks into the experiences of the ACT and other municipalities. We can’t just say, “We’ll have a board.” In this case I suspect it is because it is different from the way things are managed at the moment and it supports a particular move that the federal government has made. Thus we see the ACT Liberals bringing the fight here to the local level. I was not convinced that public hospital boards could better manage ACT public hospitals than existing bureaucratic systems. I would like to see evidence that they would.
This bill seems to arise from the assertion that there are systemic management issues within our public hospitals. However, we are still awaiting the outcome of an internal review and a coronial inquiry which looked at the recent issues in depth, to see how they could be improved. I would also like to see how Canberra Hospital measures up when its performance is investigated in an accreditation process next year. That will show us whether its management process is providing safe and quality outcomes for patients and staff.
I do not think a move right now to a public board would improve the outcomes for Canberra Hospital. It could very well end up in a duplication of bureaucratic processes. It could end up in a clash between the different levels, which would not be helpful to the patients. We will either have a community board which has few teeth or we will have a community board that has a lot of teeth and will inevitably come into conflict with the other levels of administration in the hospital. I do not see how any of that is going to improve the quality of health.
Clause 6 (b) of the bill requires the board to advise and make recommendations to the minister on matters relating to the health budget in relation to public hospitals in the territory. However, as members of previous ACT public boards have commented, they had little sway on funding decisions. Imagine the frustration of belonging to a board that has to put in hours of work, hours of meetings, and then finds that its advice is ignored anyway.
A public board that is given little room to advocate to the government how much funding is required or where it should go has diminished capacity to improve the hospitals that it is involved in managing. Perhaps this really comes down to which government the board is reporting to. I wonder whether previous boards that reported to ACT Liberal governments had the ability to make recommendations about health budgets and whether the Liberals paid attention to those recommendations. Apparently not.
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