Page 3143 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
These are the facts: Chief Minister Gallagher knew that there was a 10-year war in obstetrics and did nothing about it, but over a 15-month period numerous doctors left the hospital and both Chief Minister Gallagher and her predecessor, Stanhope, minimised the issue, bullied the complainants, offered an open inquiry and hid the results. And doctors and medical staff alike felt helpless and unsafe in the obstetrics department.
But the 10-year war in obstetrics is not the only example. My colleagues here today have spoken about the data-doctoring scandal and the state of mind of the person who has come forward and fallen on her sword. She did the wrong thing. She knows she did the wrong thing but she did, in a sense, the right thing by the community by resigning, by giving up her privileged position, when this came to a head.
She talked about the political imperative to meet the targets. Who sets the political imperative? Katy Gallagher, the Minister for Health and Chief Minister. She talked about the political imperative. She talked in her letter to the Auditor-General about “the pressure to demonstrate improved performance”, “my feelings of being trapped and fearful” and “feelings of fear, isolation and distress”. She talked about the environment in the hospital where she was simply told to fix the numbers. She was told that she was not a good leader and she said, “I foolishly and stupidly did it in an attempt to protect myself and the staff who I work with.”
Remember, Madam Deputy Speaker, this is not some Liberal commentator making these comments about the culture in the hospital; these are the words of a friend of the Chief Minister, someone so close to the Chief Minister that they shared a holiday in France and who, presumably, wanted to make the Chief Minister look good. And this is part of the human face of the system built by this Chief Minister.
Here we have a woman who did the wrong thing. But what motivated her? And here are the facts about what motivated her. The commitments had been made to the Chief Minister. She was pressured, trapped and fearful, and she felt that she had to protect her staff. So when the commitments to the Chief Minister could not be kept, when she realised that the system was not being fixed, she and others just fixed the numbers. We know that this executive is not the only person involved, and my colleagues have dwelt on the subject that we have not got to the bottom of this story and what it is that this Chief Minister might be hiding.
But one of the big myths about the data doctoring scandal is that it is just about numbers. I have heard it from the Chief Minister, I have heard it from Ms Bresnan and I have heard it from Ms Hunter that no people suffered as a result of the data-doctoring scandal. We simply do not know. But we do know—and the facts show, the research shows—that delays in emergency department lead to adverse medical outcomes. The Australian College of Emergency Medicine, in their meta data study on access block and overcrowding, said:
There is a 20%-30% excess mortality rate every year that is attributable to access block and ED overcrowding …
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video