Page 5914 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 2010
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Dr Brown said she would be happy to investigate any concerns.
“We have an open approach and if there are concerns clearly we want to address them,” she said.
“But we can’t address them in the absence of information about what the concerns are.”
Again, that was not true. Further:
Dr Brown says they have spoken to staff currently working in the unit and no issues were raised.
“I don’t believe that all of the people who have left in the last 15-18 months are disgruntled with the system,” she said.
ABC online stated that ACT Health Acting Chief Executive Peggy Brown said the obstetricians left for personal reasons. I cannot vouch for all of those nine that left, or the one that left subsequently—that they left because of the bullying—but certainly it is quite clear that many of them did not leave for personal reasons. They left because they were being harassed and bullied.
So those statements by the acting chief executive were not true. They were clearly not the truth. It is quite clear that the exodus of staff was in large part due to what was happening at the centre. Perhaps Peggy Brown did not know what was going on—she should have known what was going on—she was lied to or she was not being fully open herself. It is quite clear that when she got on the public record and said that no complaints had been made, that was not true.
I am willing to believe that she simply did not know what was going on, that she had been misled either intentionally or inadvertently. I still assert she should have known. But you have got to remember that it is Peggy Brown who has made the decision not to release this information. This is a process where quite clearly something has gone very badly wrong. It has been bungled. You have got the chief executive saying no complaints have been made, that they left for personal reasons, when it has been demonstrated not to be the truth. In fact, we know it is not because the clinical review said:
There is evidence of a systemic reticence to address staff performance issues in
the maternity unit at the Canberra Hospital, particularly issues of inappropriate
behaviour by certain medical staff.
It is very unfortunate that someone who might be involved in the bungling that has occurred in this process, or indeed trying to get to the bottom of what might have been wilful cover-ups—and that is what was identified in the clinical review—is the person who is then making the decision about whether to release information which may be quite damaging to senior bureaucrats and to herself in that department. It is very disturbing that no information is going to be released when we know that that information could be quite damaging. The people who are making the decision not to release information may be those who have the most to lose from the release of that information.
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