Page 4024 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 26 November 2014
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“There’s extreme distress, fatigue and lack of coping. Everybody is still performing their job as best they can in very difficult circumstances. This has been ongoing for months or even longer.”
And this is the unit that we were assured had been fixed. The ABC, in a report entitled “Canberra Hospital at risk of losing teaching accreditation”, stated:
The Canberra Hospital could lose its accreditation as a teaching hospital amid accusations of a “toxic” culture of bullying in the maternity department.
Indeed if Canberra Hospital were to lose that accreditation, that would be a disaster for the ACT. It continued:
… staff bullying has plagued the department since concerns were first raised four years ago …
Several doctors have told the ABC staff relations at the hospital have deteriorated to the point where patient care has suffered.
Doctors on the front line are telling people that it has deteriorated so badly that patient care has suffered. And what is this minister saying? “Don’t raise these concerns. The staff don’t want to hear it.” In actual fact it is the staff who have raised these concerns. They want to hear it because they have been ignored by the minister. The ABC report continued:
One senior staff member told the ABC the department was a “car wreck”, while others have spoken about verbal threats of violence and intimidating emails.
Part of this has come to light because the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have done a review. They do this on a frequent basis; they review a unit to make sure that it is safe and that it is clinically appropriate for training to occur. And that report has been damning. As I said, it has been described as the worst maternity training unit in Australia. We have not seen that report, but, as we understand it, extracts were leaked to the Canberra Times, to the media, to the ABC. I quote:
Mismanagement and long-running cultural problems inside the Canberra Hospital maternity unit have put the health of patients at serious risk, an official report has warned, as adverse medical outcomes, inadequate supervision and critically low morale remain.
That is from the Canberra Times on 21 November, just the other week. Quoting from this leaked report—and we cannot confirm this but maybe the minister can—the article continued:
“The unit is significantly at risk of both adverse medical outcomes and personal risk to the health and wellbeing of the registrars” …
It highlights staff shortages, a lack of engagement by visiting doctors, increasing birth numbers, shortages of senior doctors, limited clinical experience, poor rostering, conflicting management protocols and “widespread disaffection.”
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