Page 1791 - Week 05 - Thursday, 16 May 2019
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David Watters, for their expertise, leadership and compassionate approach in their conduct of this review.
I reiterate that the government has agreed to all the recommendations and the broad implementation time frame. Many of the initiatives will be ongoing and are aimed at embedding best practice and continuous improvement throughout the ACT public health system. I take this opportunity to assure staff, stakeholders and the community that the government will implement the recommendations of the independent panel and will do so in the same spirit of sincerity with which it embarked on the review.
In line with the recommendation 17 of the final report and the tabling of the government response today, I, the Minister for Mental Health, the Director-General of ACT Health, the Chief Executive Officer of Canberra Health Services, and the regional CEO of Calvary ACT will today make a public commitment to collectively implement the review’s recommendations to ensure ongoing cultural improvement across the ACT public health system.
The government is committed to providing members of the Assembly with a biannual update on progress in implementing the recommendations over the next three years. I look forward to sharing with you all the work that is underway to implement the recommendations contained in the final report in the first biannual update later this year. I am confident that there will be further improvement and change in the workplace culture across our health system, which will further improve the good work that is currently underway. The effect of this will be a better public health system for the Canberra community and a healthier staff culture.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (10.43): I thank the minister for her statement. I look forward to reading the government response when it is circulated. This is a very important stepping-off point. Although the Reid report was finalised in March, I note from the minister’s statement that the staff implementation committee met, I think, the day before yesterday for the first time. That delay does not say to me that there is a sense of urgency or priority within the system that the minister says that there is. The results of this will only evolve over time. There will not be a particular day when we say it is all done. One of the things we will need to do is to test the results. We as an Assembly need to consider how to do this. We need to be able to discern the extent to which staff satisfaction with their workplace improves.
I and my colleagues in this place—Mr Hanson has done this over the years, and Mr Smyth before him—have consistently asked for the workplace culture surveys to be made available. That has never happened. In going forward, we need to find a mechanism for reporting back to the community and this Assembly about how workplace culture has improved, and we also need to look at what it was like beforehand. Rather than just rely on biannual reports from the minister that say everything is going swimmingly, we need statistical, empirical information that will show us whether we are improving. The Assembly needs to look at mechanisms for doing that. There may be some role for, say, the health committee to look at these issues and perhaps have some oversight or some involvement in that process. I do not have a formulated view on that, but there does need to be some reporting and some mechanism for following up on issues.
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