Page 2311 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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The committee has done a good job. There are 13 recommendations, Mr Speaker. Some of them go to process, particularly recommendations 2, 3 and 4. Committee recommendation 2 is that the government should more widely promote the availability of early payments for the treatment of motor crash injuries as provided under section 72. Some of the evidence there was that the take-up is increasing. There is an early payment, which is good so that people can get well. The quicker you restore your health, the better the outcome. We can see from some of the payouts that those that take a long time to get well seem to get bigger payouts. That may be a tactic or a strategy in some cases but it is unfortunate.
In recommendation 3 the committee recommends the ACT government review the provision concerning compulsory conferencing to determine a more practical approach. Some concerns were made to the committee that compulsory conferencing does not work and that in fact it is more of a hindrance now than an assist. It should be an assist but we need to make sure that it works properly and that people get the best out of it.
Recommendation 4 is a very important recommendation. As Mr Hargreaves said, we were given a lot of information that generally perhaps had not been made available to the public and certainly not to MLAs, particularly about the AMA guidelines. The AMA guidelines are the American Medical Association guidelines. We currently use guide 4. The thought was that we would go to guide 5.
What it says in the introduction to the AMA guidelines that most of us probably have not read is that they are not to be used as a tool for determining compensation. The AMA guidelines are a tool to allow doctors to discuss among themselves what the level of injury is. The guides do not make a determination that because of a level of physical injury this is what you are entitled to as compensation.
The easy case is someone who plays a musical instrument at symphony concert level. The loss of a finger could be devastating because it would not allow you to play your instrument, whereas for someone who does not use their hands or their digits in that sense, the loss of a finger under the guidelines is worth a much lesser payout.
If you are applying that using the AMA guidelines what you are doing is disadvantaging people. In many ways for me that was a real turning point in the way that I approached this. I have to say that I was not aware that that foreword in the AMA guidelines said, “Do not use this to determine compensation.” But what do we do? We use it to determine compensation. So I think recommendation 4 is very important in the scheme of things.
The next recommendation that I would like to refer to is recommendation 7. Recommendation 7 recommends that the ACT government advise the Assembly of how it intends to address the issue of lifetime care for people catastrophically injured in the context of the development of the commonwealth proposals regarding the NDIS or, in the absence of NDIS, how it will examine the feasibility of lifetime care for people catastrophically injured in motor vehicle crashes.
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