Page 3219 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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There is one recommendation about an inquiry, which is recommendation 16, and I will come to that at the close. There is a recommendation about an apology to the individual. And we are not excusing what the individual did. You cannot be part of the doctoring of 11,700 records and, I believe, expect to keep your job. She has done the right thing by resigning. But there was the way that she was treated, firstly, by the Chief Minister and, secondly, by the department when they deliberately outed her name by photocopying the transmission letter and attaching that to the front of the report. In my 14 years here, I do not think I have ever seen a letter like that accidentally photocopied. I do not think I have seen a letter like that made public in that way, full stop. It is just not credible.
The point here is that everybody is innocent until proven guilty, and even then people are entitled to their privacy, if it is appropriate. That did not occur in this place, and, yes, there have been acknowledgements that a mistake—if you could accept the mistake was made—was made but what there has not been is an apology. There should be an apology. As I said this morning, a large number of people have come to me when I have been out door-knocking or at shopping centres and have said: “This is a good nurse. What she did was wrong, but she really was a good nurse and she did make a significant contribution to the operation and administration of the Canberra Hospital.” What the majority of the community is saying about this is that that needs to be acknowledged and the government’s failure of process needs to be apologised for.
There are 10 recommendations that, when you take them as a whole, show the systematic failure of administration of the health portfolio by this government and, particularly over the last six years, by this minister. And they look at things as diverse as protecting patient information, training of staff, data validation, the rapid sign-on system, IT systems, throughput and triage targets, internal communications within the department, external communications from the department, the very culture that exists in the department, protecting the private information of staff as well as data.
If you look at that as a whole and if you go back and read the transcript of the Auditor-General’s evidence when she appeared before the committee, she said, “We did this report very quickly because that was the request. We didn’t have time to delve into the myriad issues that were exposed simply by our looking at this data and the data tampering of the 11,700 records.” And I think if anybody reads this report and reads those 10 recommendations about that broad range of issues of failure of management of the system by this health minister, then there can only be one conclusion, and that is the system is not being managed properly. It is certainly not being managed to the benefit of the staff. We acknowledge and thank the staff for their dedication, because, I suspect, it is only the staff and their dedication that keep the system afloat. We say that this generally, as was revealed this morning, does have problems and may put people at risk. Of course, we had the new scandal that emerged this morning.
The last recommendation, recommendation 16, I will read out:
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