Page 2838 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 14 August 2018
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I kid you not: there are people who contact me regularly and who pass me in the street and say, “Keep it up. Keep giving them hell because we live in hell.”
The Auditor-General’s report that came out soon afterwards puts the lie to the claim that Minister Fitzharris and Minister Rattenbury have made that there are respectful pathways. The things that were outlined in the Auditor-General’s report show that in all cases that the Auditor-General looked at there were not respectful pathways.
I am very concerned about the restructure that is going to take place in Health because I do not believe that it will deliver better services to the people of the ACT. The restructure decision was taken by the Chief Minister on his own. It was a captain’s call. It did not go to cabinet. There is no evidence to support the decision. There is no paperwork anywhere. I have FOI-ed the Chief Minister, Minister Fitzharris and Mr Rattenbury, and there is no paperwork to support this brief. There is one brief from the Head of Service to the Chief Minister which says that no-one was consulted about the change in the structure, and there is no paperwork.
There is no record of a discussion, any discussion, between Mr Rattenbury and the minister for health, and there are no records of a discussion between the minister for health and the Chief Minister in relation to these issues. We are told of meetings between ministers and between ministers and senior officers, but there is no evidence for that. There is not a post-it note.
The lack of process in this space also led to the removal of the former director-general, and this issue does need scrutiny. Six weeks out from the start of the new restructure the community and this Assembly are in the dark about what it will look like and how it will work and who will be the chief officials in charge of this restructure.
We have touched on the health data review. The ACT does not have good health data and it has not for at least nine years. In 2009 and 2012 we have recorded data doctoring at the Canberra Hospital and we do know of one person who put their hand up for that. We know from the Auditor-General’s report that it was impossible for just one person to have done all the data doctoring and that data doctoring happened on days when that person was not at work so that there were other people involved, and we have never got to the bottom of that.
We have poor data management leading to missing time lines in reporting of data to the AIHW and the Productivity Commission in 2016. We have issues that were raised by the former shadow minister for health before the 2016 election about anomalies in elective surgery reporting, which was looked at by the Auditor-General and resulted in root and branch reviews. To my knowledge PricewaterhouseCoopers have been through ACT Health three times and Ernst & Young once. In addition, Mr Bob Sendt on behalf of the Auditor-General has looked at much of this reporting as well. We have a real problem in ACT Health data. (Second speaking period taken.)
We have spent millions of dollars on a health data review, and it is now four months overdue. We have gone more than 18 months without quarterly performance reporting, and I fear that taxpayers will end up having spent millions of dollars and still end up with poor health data.
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