Page 3778 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 28 October 2015
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(xiv) on 20 October 2015 The Canberra Times reported that intensive care nurses at TCH complained of unsafe staff levels and a lack of confidence in hospital management and threatened strike action;
(2) calls on the Minister to explain:
(a) to the Assembly and the ACT community why the ACT public hospital failures are so systemic; and
(b) what his strategies are to address the failures; and
(3) calls on the Minister to report to the Assembly by 30 June 2016 on the progress of strategies to fix ACT public hospitals.
It is certainly not the first time that I have had cause to move a motion in this place about the situation that we find ourselves in regarding ACT Health and I have endeavoured to make this motion one that we can all support. It simply outlines public reporting of events that have occurred within the health system. There is nothing that is not on the public record that is in the text of the motion. It calls on the minister to explain why we have so many systemic failures. Some of them we addressed and in question time he said, in his words, they dated back to pre-World War Two. The motion asks for the minister’s strategies to address these failures—I think that is a reasonable request—and asks him to report back on his progress by mid-June.
The reality is that there are very serious issues afoot in our health system. The motion lists a number of them, and I have deliberately referenced the public reporting lest people think I am making this up. These are all media reports, most of them from the ABC and the Canberra Times, that are referencing other people speaking about issues, be it the AMA, the ANMF, reports tabled by the government, such as quarterly reports and annual reports, or reports from other organisations—AIHW and elsewhere. There is nothing that has been made up or fabricated in any sense. These are genuine reports. There are a lot of them that tell a picture. Individually they are bad enough, but when you put them together it is clear there is a systemic problem.
Just this week, on Monday, we have seen the minister at loggerheads with the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, disputing their claims that there are critical shortages at the ICU, that there are staff shortages, and that the ANMF has lost confidence in the management. On Monday the minister refuted that outright. When the AMA has raised questions about the government’s strategy to fix the widespread and systemic bullying in the system, he has disputed what the AMA says. So we have a real problem here, Mr Assistant Speaker.
I will go through a number of the issues, but my call on the minister is eminently reasonable. Why are we in this situation—he was happy to talk about that in question time on a number of fronts—and what is he doing? If he is not prepared to do that regarding our biggest area of financial commitment and, in my view, the most important service delivery area in the ACT government, then why not?
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