Page 2308 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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because it is a demanding portfolio, but it is all the more reason to encourage people to come forward and to sort out problems in the system.
Mrs Burke is acting on reasonable complaints people are making and doing her job. Far from running any misinformation campaign, she is doing her job. She is acting on legitimate complaints people have. In that way, she is holding the government accountable—and, hopefully, holding them accountable so that they can take some action to improve the system.
It is a system where you are never going to improve it 100 per cent. But you can certainly do a hell of a lot more than you are doing at present. It is not as though you are not putting a lot of money into it. You are putting considerable sums of money into it. It amazes me how, despite that, there still are a number of obvious problems which are not actually being addressed. I will come to some of those shortly.
You see that there are problems in a system like this through court cases from time to time. We see one going at present; it deals with issues around what a certain doctor did or did not do in the system from about 1993 through to about 2002, going through the gamut of all governments. I myself was involved in a case which was, sadly, an inquest in relation to a number of things that went wrong back in 1993, when you, Mr Speaker, were health minister. Again, I must thank you for your openness and assistance to the family of the deceased in terms of rigorously looking at what went wrong with the hospital then and at various people or whatever at that particular time. Hopefully, some improvements were made as a result of that.
There is no need to be defensive about it. We all accept that things will go wrong. There is a need to move on and try to ensure that, if there are problems with basic equipment and supplies, we sort them out. For goodness sake, sort them out. I hope that that has happened now. I detect that it may well have happened. I hope so. I certainly do not want to see that happen again.
Make sure. Things like infection—yes, absolutely critical. If you have controls in place now, well and good, but let us make sure that they are being followed. Let us ensure that, if we have something in place where people actually can report risks and incidents, they can do so in an open way. They need to be able to do so so that they do not have any fear that they are going to get into trouble. Again, that does concern me. I know people in the system, and I get word back that there are problems.
I know that we face some significant problems. A very important part of Mrs Burke’s motion is paragraph (2), noting:
… the Australian Nurses Federation has developed it’s own “Critical Staffing Notice” warning management of insufficient staffing levels and safe accommodation of patients …
Staffing is an issue. Yes, we have a skill shortage. Yes, there are probably some ways that we can improve that in the medium term. I will come to those in the time remaining.
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