Page 1519 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 8 May 2018
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The accreditation audit conducted in March 2018 has concluded that the Canberra Hospital failed to meet 37 standards. Two were rated as extreme risks relating to patient safety in mental health. Six related to high risks relating to governance, strategic planning, decision-making, non-compliance with policy and procedure, and low completion rates of surgical checklists and inpatient discharge summaries. Fifteen were rated as moderate and 14 were rated as low risk.
The two extreme risks relating to mental health are perhaps the underlying reason why Mr Rattenbury will not be supporting this motion today, I presume because they show his failures as the Minister for Mental Health as well. He also seems to be joined at the hip with the minister for health in all of the catastrophic announcements that have been made.
The six failures rated as high risk in the main go to the governance and management of ACT Health. The minister’s answer on this is to split the directorate in two. We all come from a public service town. We all know that when a minister is in trouble, whether it is at the ACT level or the federal level, what we do is have a restructure.
Restructures are always expensive, and they will be on this occasion. Instead of one director-general, we will have two. We will have two corporate arrangements and we know that even the mere changing of the name of an organisation is a cost to the organisation. It is not fair to the health bureaucrats who are trying to do a good job in Canberra that they do not know what their futures will hold because no-one has actually worked out what this restructuring will look like.
We had an announcement that sounded like a thought bubble at the end of March but there has been very little work done publicly to assure people that this will be a success. We only have the minister’s word for it. The minister has also given us her word for it that elective surgery waiting times are going in the right direction.
We have had 17 years of ACT Labor in the driver’s seat of health and the health system has been run down. They have made a fine art of turning good waiting list figures into bad waiting list figures. This has been consistently the case. There were some improvements a few years ago after a range of blitzes in relation to elective surgery waiting lists, but overall we are worse off than we were when Labor came to power.
The issue of accreditation is a serious one. The report says that the failures boil down to a governance system with a “lack of clarity, role confusion, poorly defined accountability structures” that created higher risks for hospital staff and patients. The report recommends that the organisation review the current governance system to promote the integration of systems and provide clear lines of accountability and reporting.
Madam Speaker, I think that is what we thought we were having. For over a year we have had the minister talking about the system-wide hospital review, the creation of virtual centres of excellence et cetera and that that was going along on a particular path. Suddenly at the end of March, we had a quantum shift. We moved slightly to the
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