Page 117 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 27 November 2012
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The process involved 14 surveyors, highly experienced clinicians from around the country, coming to look at our hospital. I attended the feedback session and the words they used to me were words like “exceptional”, “remarkable” and “excellence”. A couple of the surveyors spoke to me and said that it was unusual to see a hospital and health service providing the level of service and standard of service that we are lucky enough to receive here in the ACT.
Some quotes from the surveyors were that the care given by staff is of the highest level, that some of the programs in health promotion are spectacular, that the clinical care is simply very good and that the new facilities, the NICU, the women’s and children’s hospital and the adult mental health unit, are simply stunning.
There are 47 criteria that people are rated against. There is a self-assessment process and the Health Directorate had self-assessed as meeting the “extensive achievement”, which is virtually the highest award, 11 times. But the survey came back from the surveyors saying that they believed the directorate had achieved 19 extensive achievements, so eight more than the directorate had assessed for itself, and they also awarded it an “outstanding achievement”.
I think it is important to put it on the record because, despite what some will say in this place, I will take the word of 14 highly experienced surveyors going through every aspect of our health system—from the clinical care to the policies and procedures, to the patient safety processes that underpin it, to the organisational structure, to feedback from the staff on the ground, to talking with consumer organisations—and take their response, and their response was that we have an excellent health system.
Yes, the health system is under some pressure, but probably no city of our size has a health system that is as good, and it is a credit to the staff and a credit to the director-general, who has led extraordinary change across this organisation in her time as the head.
At the end of the accreditation process she was given cheers and claps from the staff. The staff had packed out the auditorium. They had also packed out the staff cafeteria at Canberra Hospital. That does not tell me that those staff are unhappy in that workplace. That tells me they are staff that are very proud of the work they do and they are proud of the work that Dr Peggy Brown and the executive that underpins her have done in addressing areas where there needs to be improvement but also in creating excellence within the health system.
It is not very often you get to attend sessions like that and to hear people from outside the ACT really compliment the health system that we have here and also compliment the leadership of staff from the bottom to the top of an organisation that, whilst we will always continue to improve and need to improve, is already performing at the highest possible standard. It is a credit to be their minister.
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