Page 3222 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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It is also important to note that this fabrication has been going on for a long time, and it was not related in most cases, in 11,000 of the 11,700 cases, to the NEAT data, to the data that relates to the money. It was all related to the ATS data, which essentially is the political data, the data that informs us about the progress of our emergency department, the data that is reported in the budget, the quarterly reports on health and annual reports and so on.
Who did this and why? The question of who remains unanswered. We know one person. We know one individual who did this, but the Auditor-General tells us that there were more. But it was the director of critical care. The director of critical care, if you look at the organisational chart, is two spots below the minister. We are not talking about some junior official. We are talking about someone two spots below the minister. And why did she do it? In her words, because of the political imperative—the political imperative—to get the numbers sorted!
Who sets the political imperative? The minister? I think it would be a reasonable assumption that that is set by the minister, unless the minister has given up and is not running the department that she tells us that she is. The individual who doctored the data has also told us she did it because of her feelings of isolation, of fear. She was fearful for her staff. It does not excuse her actions, but when the Auditor-General told us that many other staff felt the same way, it certainly goes some way to making it understandable why that happened. And it is quite clear, as Mrs Dunne outlined in her speech earlier today, that the individual concerned was—and probably still is by many people—highly regarded across the health system. And people were genuinely shocked.
But what the Chief Minister has done, in her decision not to pursue anyone else that was doing this, in her decision not to pursue the systemic issue that led to this, has essentially hung this individual out to dry and said: “She’s the scapegoat. Don’t come looking after me. Don’t go after any of the other executives. Let’s just hang this individual out to dry.” It does not excuse what this individual does, but I do not think that this individual should be carrying all of the blame, which is clearly what Katy Gallagher is attempting to achieve.
So that is Katy Gallagher’s legacy: a hospital system in decline, be it elective surgery or emergency departments; massive fabrication of the results that made it look better; people saying that there was a political imperative; and staff working in a culture of fear, isolation and distress.
The other element that is not addressed fully in the PAC report is the issue of the conflict of interest. And it is relevant, because it was not addressed by the Auditor-General. The Chief Minister’s position has been a bit of, can we say, a moving feast on this one. But what we do know is that on radio she was saying she told the Auditor-General and now has changed that and has said she did not tell the Auditor-General. The commonsense test is: if you go to the south of France for an extensive holiday—and I believe in the same house with an individual, for a period of about a month and, as we know, Katy Gallagher was telling us and was boasting when she came back in 2010 about her sipping rose—if you spent a month with an individual
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