Page 2099 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 2020
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1. Omit paragraph (2).
2. Omit paragraph (4), substitute:
“(4) notes the ACT Government’s ongoing commitment to ensuring all staff are treated with respect and paid fairly and accurately; and
(5) calls on the Minister for Health to report back to the Assembly on the collaborative work underway between Canberra Health Services and Shared Services to examine payroll issues by the end of April 2021.”.
I would like to start by talking about Mrs Dunne’s motion, as originally presented, which is to acknowledge the considerable and outstanding effort of our health staff on an ongoing basis, but particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been an extraordinary time, and I often sit and reflect on the experiences of health workers. We have seen a lot of coverage, particularly out of Victoria in recent weeks, where the pressure has really been on.
At the start of this pandemic health workers were really stepping into the unknown. Like the rest of the community, they did not know what was coming, but they were very much at the front lines of it. They work hard at the best of times, but to combine that level of hard work with incredible uncertainty would have been particularly challenging for our health staff.
We have obviously been relatively fortunate in the ACT in that our caseload and our fatality rate have been much smaller than in many other places. We have not needed many of the preparations that have been put in place, but I know that during the early phases of the preparation people were working incredibly hard to create new systems to try and think through all of the potential scenarios—at a time when there was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of unknown—to make sure that as many contingencies were being prepared for as possible. I am very grateful for that.
I had the good fortune to be at many briefings where we were taken through those preparations. The Canberra community will probably never know all the steps that were put in place just in case they were needed. They may still be needed, but we can all hope that the steps we have taken will ensure that that is not the case. There was an extraordinary amount of work done to make sure that this city was as ready as possible in the event of some of the scenarios that were being contemplated.
Having been the Minister for Mental Health over the last nearly four years, I am very aware of the work that our mental health staff put in. I have had the really good fortune to have a lot of the staff talk to me about things that are going on, to have had the opportunity to visit sites, to be walked through the work that is going on, to have models of care explained to me, to have innovations explained to me, and to have had people putting forward ideas. So I am also very aware of how our mental health staff make a very significant contribution; and that has been amplified during the COVID-19 period.
It is no secret that the pressure on mental health capacity has gone up during this period. There are a range of reasons for that. Today is not the day to speculate on
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