Page 1640 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 1 May 2012
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Directorate. The Auditor-General’s review across data collection and reporting systems at the Canberra Hospital will ensure that we can be confident of the accuracy of other data reported and, importantly, will identify how we can strengthen our data integrity processes.
At this stage it appears that waiting and treatment times have been altered on some records without authority. The evidence to date suggests this to be an isolated instance. I do not believe the integrity and professionalism of the vast majority of Health Directorate staff should be judged on what appear to be the actions of one individual.
The Health Directorate is establishing a steering committee to oversee the PWC audit and representatives have been invited to participate in this committee from the Department of Health and Ageing, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the ACT Auditor-General, the Health Care Consumers Association, the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the independent chair of the ACT Health Directorate audit and risk management committee, the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association, and the Australian Medical Association.
As members can see, this is an independent and objective group that has been invited to oversee the audit process.
The Health Directorate has also identified a number of measures that are being put in place quickly to ensure that this will not happen again with ED data. These include the use of a new front sheet which is attached to every clinical record in the ED and is signed off by the clinician, a weekly validation review in the ED and a monthly reconciliation audit that will reconcile the validation log with the computer change log. Furthermore the internal auditor will be asked to conduct a six-monthly audit of the ED data and the processes undertaken.
Notwithstanding this, the Health Directorate has always had in place internal and external validation processes. In this instance the external validation process identified an anomalous data pattern. An internal investigation then uncovered the data manipulation that has occurred.
The full impact on the Health Directorate ED data is yet to be determined. The Health Directorate have completed work to correct the data for the national emergency access target data—the NEAT data—for the first three months of 2012 that is required to be submitted to the commonwealth. It appears from this that the overall impact on that data is a reduction in overall performance of approximately two per cent. Work is being progressed on correcting the data for ED waiting times. Until this is completed I cannot speculate on the size of the impact on ED timeliness.
In relation to the NEAT target, our target for the calendar year of 2012 is to have 64 per cent of patients admitted, discharged or referred elsewhere within four hours. Prior to this issue being uncovered the Health Directorate believed that the result for the first quarter for the ACT would be approximately 59 per cent. The adjusted figure is likely to mean that our overall performance is reduced, probably to around 57 per cent.
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