Page 4281 - Week 13 - Thursday, 19 November 2015
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famous statement by former health minister Gallagher about the 10-year war in obstetrics. How is it that the government can be aware of a problem of this nature for 10 years and do nothing about it? We have had recent allegations of bullying aimed at the surgeons. So it would appear that it would continue in Health unabated.
The question is: what are the government doing, why is what they are doing so ineffective, and what will they do, what will they change, to provide people with the sort of workplace that they deserve and the sort of workplace that we would all expect them to have to go to each day?
There are a number of factors here. Firstly, for the individual involved, their own personal wellbeing is at risk. But then there are the people that they are looking after. Whether they are a service provider directly or whether they are running an area behind the scenes, it affects the reputation and the effectiveness of the ACT public service, and it must change.
Of course, it is not the individual that is affected. There are financial costs to this. It is interesting that it is not just about jobs; it actually affects staff’s mental wellbeing. In Senate estimates last year Comcare noted that the ACT public service recorded 3.6 mental health claims per thousand workers. This surpasses the 1.9 claims per thousand workers in the Australian public service. The number of claims in the ACT public service is almost double. That is a very grim reputation that the Chief Minister has to answer for. Compare this to the private sector, where the figure is 0.4 claims per thousand. So it is double the figure for the Australian public service, and it is nine times the figure for the private sector—the claims for mental health issues against the ACT public service.
Through the annual reports hearings we have identified PIDs that have, let us face it, been finessed by the system and then left unresolved. For some years now we have asked the question: how many PIDs were there? There is a direction, in the Chief Minister’s directions for annual reports, that PIDs have to be reported on; not just that they had some, but what they did, how they were responded to and what was the outcome. We have all had approaches from individuals who know that if you make a PID, in many ways you are ending your public service career. It becomes unbearable for people while the claims are being investigated because there is no-one independent to do that investigation.
Let us look at work culture in the Emergency Services Agency. How is it that, in the ACT Ambulance Service—not in my words but in the words of the union—“a toxic management culture” was allowed to exist? The failure to investigate bullying in the ACT Ambulance Service led to a provisional improvement notice by the ACT work safety commission. Allowing bullying in the ACT led to a complaint being lodged with the Fair Work Ombudsman. We had the failure to upgrade, for instance, the ACT Ambulance VACIS electronic case management system, which put additional stress on workers. We had the ongoing six-year failure to procure new uniforms for ACT Ambulance Service personnel. We had the failure to procure fully functional defibrillators.
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