Page 624 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 2010
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the minister, as I understand it and she can clarify, to say that they are not going to work at the Canberra Hospital because of the environment there.
If we are to build a women’s and children’s hospital, if we are to have a sustainable healthcare workforce, we need to address the issues, or the perception of issues, at the Canberra hospitals to make sure that staff do not leave and that staff are able to be recruited to be employed at the Canberra Hospital.
In relation to the staff that left, Dr Foote said:
It’s unheard of … Basically, when you’ve only half finished your training—
and this is in reference to the registrars—
you don’t have a qualification ticket and you are clearly at risk of never getting your qualification certificate if you walk away from the training program.
So things must be pretty difficult for a registrar to do that.
And I concur: these are not people that could go anywhere else. These are people that left halfway through their training. So what we know is that five obstetricians and four registrars have left. We know that we have received and seen in the media allegations of poor medical outcomes. The two that were aired on the ABC—and I commend the ABC for its long and detailed investigation into this matter—were of a patient at the Canberra Hospital who was advised to have a late-term abortion despite six separate specialists’ opinions that stated that the baby would be born healthy, and a Canberra woman who almost died three years ago when she was treated for a molar pregnancy in which foetal cells turned cancerous. The procedure was carried out by an unsupervised registrar and it went wrong. I quote from her mother:
“Perforated my uterus multiple times and then in doing that they pulled my bowel down and nicked that six times … They had to pull my complete insides out and empty them and cut out 30 centimetres of my small bowel.”
In the rush to repair the damage, pregnancy tissue was left inside …
I will not name her—
Despite two more procedures to remove it, she developed a life threatening bacterial infection five months later.
These are most grievous, serious issues and they are not to be dismissed as the minister has spent so much of her time, even today, dismissing them. I think it is fair to say that expectant mothers in the ACT would be concerned and they would be demanding the most rigorous investigation into these complaints.
We know that letters were written to the minister last year by doctors outlining their concerns. We know —
Ms Gallagher: No—wrong, wrong.
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