Page 942 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 17 March 2010
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weeks of treatment. It is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario for those people and that in itself is of concern. But of greater concern, I think, is the process that led to these people actually being advised of how that would occur.
This was brought to the attention of the Canberra community by a very brave lady, Vesna Nedic, who was on Triple 6 radio last week. Many of us would have heard that interview. Vesna, in her discussion, said that she felt like a burden. She has not brought this to everyone’s attention because she wants to be brought to the top of the list. Her point is that she brought this to everyone’s attention because it was being kept secret from the Canberra community, that even the minister was unaware of the failures, the breakdown in her own department. So the minister was as surprised as the rest of us were and that requires further explanation.
It seems, sadly, that the only way many of these concerns—I reflect on obstetrics, I reflect on the TB exposure, I reflect on this one—are actually coming to the surface is when brave individuals come forward to the media or to the opposition and say, “This is going wrong.” It is the only way we actually find out what is happening.
Unfortunately, in this case what occurred is that patients were not actually being advised by ACT Health that they would need to have their radiotherapy interstate until such time as they actually tried to access those services in the ACT. So what was happening was that people started their cancer treatment, and you can imagine this is a very stressful time, finished their chemo and went to get their radiotherapy. What were they met with? They were met with a closed door and an inability to find out what was going wrong.
Vesna told Triple 6 that she was advised by the doctors of the critical importance of radiotherapy as a follow-up treatment. But she said that she was then left in the dark by Canberra Hospital before eventually being told she could not have the treatment in Canberra. She said that she had a “week and a half to two weeks to take all this in, to organise myself, prepare my family”. What a terrible situation for a cancer sufferer to be in, Mr Speaker.
Vesna and, I guess, other cancer sufferers tried to contact ACT Health to find out what was going on. But they were actually forced to ring ACT Health repeatedly before they were advised as to what was actually occurring. There was a breakdown in communication. Let me quote again from ABC radio:
That was eight phone calls every day and none of them returned til finally I was having to get very upset at some poor administrative staff to be able to have the call put to their manager who then told me, “Well, we have a staff shortage.”
So what you see there clearly is a breakdown in communication between departments in ACT Health, between ACT Health and patients and clearly between ACT Health and the minister’s office, who was clueless about what was actually going on in her own department. As reported on ABC Online by Vesna:
They knew that everyone needing attention in February and March would be compromised and they didn’t plan for that.
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