Page 1982 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 5 June 2018
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being made to ensure that accreditation of Canberra Hospital and Health Services is secured.
I present the following paper:
ACT Health accreditation update—Ministerial statement, 5 June 2018.
I move:
That the Assembly take note of the paper.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (10.51): This statement by the minister today clearly puts before us all the extent to which the ACT health service is dysfunctional, and how it has become dysfunctional under this minister or these ministers and this government.
We have a 26-page statement that says over and over again, to summarise, that there is considerable activity and work—so there is both activity and actual work—going on to ensure that the ACT hospital becomes compliant with its accreditation requirements by July this year. Of course, what is missing from this is plan B. The opposition has asked the minister on a number of occasions what is plan B. It seems that no-one has thought about plan B, because the prospect of not meeting accreditation in July is just unthinkable. It is unthinkable for the people of the ACT.
This is a litany of failure that we have heard over and over again. It is now put in a 26-page statement showing the extent of the failure of this government. The minister has justified a whole range of things since March in relation to the hospital on the basis of the splitting of the structure. The minister touches on it here again. She says, “The decision was made to split the organisation into two prior to the accreditation.” That was absolutely and strictly correct: the decision to split the structure was made by the Chief Minister on 15 March, and the accreditation took place in the week of 19 to 23 March. The announcement of the splitting was made on 23 March, the week of the accreditation process taking place in the hospital. So that is strictly true.
The minister also says that she took her responsibility to make this significant decision about the restructure and governance over a period of time. I would like the minister to demonstrate how she did that. In response to a freedom of information request, the Liberal opposition has received no documentation that would support that assertion. When I received the response to the FOI request, I asked our staff to go back to the FOI staff in both Health and Chief Minister’s to check whether they had missed any documentation. The documentation is so scant that there is nothing to support the statement that the minister made here today. In fact there is only documentation to support the fact that this minister was cut out of the decision in relation to the splitting of the agency into two. The Chief Minister locked her out of the process from January to March.
There is not even a post-it note or a diary entry—nothing—from the first week of January to 15 March, in either the documents provided by the Chief Minister’s department or the documents provided by the health department. It is not that these
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