Page 3113 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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Katy Gallagher said she was not surprised by the letter. Now that we know more of the truth, I am not surprised either.
The data doctoring scandal that so spectacularly exploded the myth of competent management at ACT Health was not the first example of dishonesty and dodgy stats that have become such an intrinsic part of this story; it was only the latest and the largest. The management of this system is such a dirge of dishonesty that almost no statement can be taken at face value.
The first example of records being adjusted to present a better picture concerned the classification of patients. If patients in the most urgent categories are not being seen on time, one expedient answer is to simply move them to a non-urgent category. When we suggested that this was indeed what was happening, we were met—once again—with vicious attacks by the Chief Minister. Over and over, she claimed no such thing was happening or could happen.
Once again we were proven right and Katy Gallagher was proven wrong. In January 2011 the Auditor-General found that patients had indeed been reclassified, without clinical reasons. In more than 252 out of 259 cases, patients who needed elective surgery were downgraded from category 1, urgent status, without any clinical reason. In 55 cases, patients were reclassified without evidence of the change being approved by a doctor. Ms Tu Pham said:
… downgrades of patients’ urgency category, often without documented clinical reasons, raised considerable doubts about the reliability and appropriateness of the clinical classifications for patients on the waiting lists.
I remind you that Katy Gallagher claimed repeatedly, in this chamber and without, that this was just not happening. This, without doubt, is a pattern of deceit from the department followed by a pattern of denial from the minister.
Despite being exposed in this deception, the minister did not take action to stamp it out in the rest of her department. In fact the deceptions flourished, and the next revelations made the patient category downgrade seem small by comparison.
On 21 April this year, it was revealed that there had been a massive, ongoing and systemic alteration of emergency department waiting times. The community then was faced with the fact that not only had Katy Gallagher and ACT Labor taken the best health system in the country and turned it into the worst but that we had been lied to about it for years.
According to the investigations conducted, the following was found:
There is evidence to indicate that hospital records relating to Emergency Department performance were manipulated between 2009 and early 2012. It is likely that up to 11,700 records relating to Emergency Department presentations were manipulated during this period.
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