Page 3166 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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MR SMYTH: Supplementary, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: Yes, Mr Smyth.
MR SMYTH: Minister, when did you first find out that the completion rate was only 52 per cent, and what action did you take to inform the community?
MS GALLAGHER: I saw those documents for the first time yesterday, when Mr Hanson, as I understand it, was provided with them.
Mr Hanson: Shame.
MS GALLAGHER: Mr Hanson, if you realistically think that every single bit of paper and minute that is generated in the hospital is actually going to cross my desk, you are sadly mistaken. There are thousands of people generating thousands of bits of paperwork. My expectation, through establishing the patient safety and quality unit and having them actually funded to do this job, which is again a legacy of this government—to actually take patient safety seriously—is that they put in place the measures to deal with patient safety and quality in the hospital. That is part of their normal job. When there is noncompliance or poor compliance, it is their job to pursue that through the hospital.
I am very confident—I have had a number of meetings with the Surgical Services Task Force, where I have met with surgeons and I have heard of their frustrations if they feel that their work is being delayed through more red tape, as they call it, and more paperwork. We have listened and we have tried to work with them, but I have made it very clear that patient safety is number one in any health system and that there will be checks and balances on this through the performance of their duties. That is what leadership of a hospital is about, leadership of the health system—putting in place those processes. And then, yes, we employ staff to do the job.
MR HARGREAVES: A supplementary.
MR SPEAKER: Yes, Mr Hargreaves.
MR HARGREAVES: Minister, when was the patient safety and compliance unit created? What professions are actually employed within that unit and at whose initiative was it created?
MS GALLAGHER: I cannot recall the exact year that the patient safety and quality unit was established. I think it was around 2004-05. It may have had a different title at that point but that was certainly the beginnings of it. It was the beginnings of a whole range of patient safety and quality processes that we have put in place through legislation, through the clinical review processes that we have established.
A lot of them have come out of the learning of what failed when Dr Newcombe was allowed for years—
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