Page 3389 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 17 August 2010
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Canberra Hospital—alleged bullying
MR COE: My question is to the Minister for Health. Minister, in March this year you commissioned an investigation into allegations of bullying and harassment under the Public Interest Disclosure Act. Will you release the outcomes of this investigation, with appropriate protection of privacy, when you receive it?
MS GALLAGHER: I did not hear that last bit. It was essentially: will we release the Public Interest Disclosure Act investigation? It is not a matter for me to determine. I will refer you to the Public Interest Disclosure Act.
Mr Seselja: Is that why you did it like that?
MS GALLAGHER: No.
Mr Seselja: So that it never sees the light of day.
MS GALLAGHER: No, it is not a matter for me to determine.
MR SPEAKER: Thank you. Mr Coe has the floor. Mr Coe, a supplementary?
MR COE: Further, will you also release the outcomes of the staff survey for ACT Health? If not, why not?
MS GALLAGHER: Will I release the workforce culture survey? No, I will not release it. Again, I have been through this before. We have a commercial arrangement with the organisation that does that work for us.
Mr Seselja: It is pretty thin. It is pretty thin, that defence.
MS GALLAGHER: No; I do not think it is pretty thin. However, we do provide feedback. It is commissioned for a particular purpose and the data is used across the organisation and indeed in individual work units, with the feedback. One of the issues in the workforce culture survey, aside from the commercial or contractual obligations with the organisation that does that work for ACT Health, is the fact that staff are informed that their input is confidential and would not be released. I am not going to change that halfway through or at the end of a process and determine that they are not the rules on which staff engage.
We have got nothing to hide from the workforce culture survey. We as a government were the ones that commissioned this work to ensure that we were responding to concerns within a large organisation. Any large workplace will have issues bubbling away that need to be responded to. The workforce culture survey was, I think, commissioned under Minister Corbell, in his period in the job. We have kept them going. The last I saw was an overwhelming improvement against nearly every indicator in the survey. We have provided feedback at whole-of-organisation level, and at individual work unit levels that information has been provided to the clinical directors for dissemination amongst staff. That is the purpose of the workforce culture
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