Page 2199 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 4 June 2013
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will add potency and clarity to the Official Visitor Act. Its amendments have been finely tuned to ensure that the new and revised schemes operate as effectively as possible.
The bill makes a number of broad changes to the Official Visitor Act, including providing specifically for official visitors to seek the assistance of other official visitors; providing for official visitors to have access to any record relating to an entitled person at a visitable place; omitting the term “inspect” and substituting “visit”; and establishing the official visitors board. It also corrects and clarifies incorrect and confusing definitions.
By these changes, we will all be able to understand what official visitors do and where they will go. If we do not iron out these issues, the scheme will not do what we need it to do.
The bill will provide for official visitors to work collaboratively. There are many instances where a collaborative approach will strengthen the responsiveness of the scheme. The bill uses the example of the children and young people official visitor requesting the assistance of the disability official visitor on a visit to Bimberi, but there are any number of ways this could work. This formal provision for collaboration will increase the effectiveness of official visitors in their “home environments”. It will add significant additional value to the information we receive from official visitors, which will help us to improve our systems and services in these environments.
Madam Speaker, in debate on the Official Visitor Bill, you indicated that you were not convinced about the need for a legislative scheme for complaints mechanisms in disability housing. The Attorney-General agreed. What we have done in this bill is re-adjust the focus of the scheme, to emphasise an official visitor’s authority to gather information. Official visitors are the eyes and ears of their minister. In fact, they are more than that: they are the eyes and ears of the community.
This bill makes it absolutely clear that an official visitor, with an entitled person’s consent, has the authority to inspect any health record or any other record relating to an entitled person at a visitable place. These records are a significant source of information about the treatment and care an entitled person receives. The bill will ensure official visitors will have the necessary authority to see incident reports, dietary plans, lists of rostered carers, behavioural plans, day plans and records about the use of any seclusion or chemical restraint.
These records will allow an official visitor to see at a glance what the entitled person has eaten, their activities, and who their carers or other medical staff are. They will know if the entitled person has been involved in any incident and, if they have, whether it was appropriately managed and reported. By making it clear that an official visitor will have the authority to see these and any other records relating to an entitled person, we reinforce our expectation around record keeping.
The development of this bill has involved extensive consultation with community groups representing people with a disability and consideration of other jurisdictions’ community visitor schemes. From these discussions and our consideration of the other
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