Page 1983 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 5 June 2018
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documents were exempt from being provided to us; they are not in the schedule. These documents do not exist. When I asked that our staff, the Liberal opposition staff, check with Health and Chief Minister’s, they came back and said, “There are no other documents that are subject to the FOI request.”
What we see here is the Chief Minister cutting the minister for health and the Minister for Mental Health out of the decision-making. We know that he made the decision on 15 March, based on a minute from the Head of Service dated 15 March which clearly says that there was no consultation with the health department. It clearly says it in the minute. Either the minute from the Head of Service is wrong and she misled the Chief Minister, or the minister has misled the community, and possibly the Assembly. The minute from the Head of Service said there was no consultation outside her directorate—there was no public consultation; there was no consultation across directorates—in relation to the proposal that she was putting to the Chief Minister that the Chief Minister signed off on the very same day. There is not even a post-it note anywhere to support the minister’s assertion that she was on top of this decision and that she thought about it for a period of time. A minute is a period of time, so I suppose she can be assured that that is strictly true, even if it is somewhat disingenuous.
Dividing the health department into two agencies is seen as the panacea for everything. Given the amount of work that needs to be done on that, I am putting on notice here that I am sceptical at this date that the government will meet its 1 October deadline.
The minister keeps talking about a lot of activities. Then she goes through the standards where we have failed. Just to reinforce it, the standards we have failed include governance for safety and quality in health service organisations, where the minister admitted that even though they knew that they were being accredited, that they were being inspected, the documents relating to some of these issues were out of date. They could not even prepare by updating the documents. What had they been doing? The minister says on page 9:
In the interest of moving ahead with addressing the Governance issues in the not met report, the Directorate’s Governance Framework, Clinical Governance Framework and Corporate Plan have been reviewed and updated to provide staff with a clear outline of reporting and accountability under the current organisational structure. These documents are currently being reviewed by the National Standards Leadership Committee.
This is quite typical of this government. There is no stakeholder consultation. These have been written and imposed, and they will gain no traction in an organisation which is dysfunctional and where there is such poor culture.
One of the things which is most alarming about this which has come forward—I suppose in a sense the Liberal opposition knew about this, but I have to confess that I do not think I processed this as well as I should have—is that the health department was essentially completely without a risk register until the AECOM report was finalised in 2016.
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