Page 4524 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 26 November 2019
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Minister for Urban Renewal) (10.41): I am pleased to have this opportunity to update the Assembly on the work that Canberra Health Services, CHS, is undertaking to address the issue of occupational violence, OV, towards staff by patients, consumers and visitors to our health services. We have all been concerned by the impact of violence towards CHS staff, and I am encouraged to say that CHS is developing an organisation-wide and multifaceted approach to address these concerns.
The date of 9 November 2019 marked one year since the CHS OV strategy working group commenced. This working group is chaired by the CEO of CHS, Bernadette McDonald, and its goal was to develop, implement and monitor the CHS OV strategy. The group has a wide range of representatives from CHS, unions, consumer representatives and WorkSafe ACT. I am pleased to say that the working group members are enthusiastically embracing the opportunity to address the issue of occupational violence.
The CHS OV strategy has been developed in collaboration with Aspex Consulting. Their considerable work done to develop the strategy included a comprehensive literature review of best practice. Importantly, feedback was received from staff who experienced OV during site visits to a range of areas, including the emergency department, maternity, the Alexander Maconochie Centre, community-based staff across all clinical divisions, the Tuggeranong Community Health Centre, an aged-care ward, a general medicine ward, the adult mental health unit and Dhulwa Mental Health Unit.
I take this opportunity to thank the hundreds of CHS staff for their engagement in the consultation for the OV strategy and the ongoing commitment by the members of the OV strategy working group. Based on these foundational activities the eight areas of focus or elements of the OV strategy have been created: governance, prevention, training, response, reporting, support, investigation and staff/consumer awareness. The OV strategy has been endorsed and will be published soon.
To support the strategy the updated policy and procedure are currently going through the endorsement process and are expected to be finalised by the end of the year. The OV strategy will be measured through achievements and milestones as detailed in the implementation plan.
The organisation-wide work has been supplemented by immediate detailed work that has been undertaken by working group members. Some examples include improvements to the staff incident reporting system to reduce the time taken to report with fewer mandated fields required. Fact sheets were issued in January to support staff on how to report an OV incident and to support managers in supporting staff following incidents as well as how to investigate the incident.
Under the element of prevention, an OV risk assessment tool will be rolled out shortly. This tool will enable areas to identify any risks and hazards that may impact on the risk of OV, for example, security processes, access and egress, work processes, building design et cetera. Other aspects of this element include processes to ensure safe work design principles, tools for screening for the risk of violence, and a security
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