Page 3785 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 28 October 2015
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has continued to increase in recent years and this is seen as evidence that risk identification and management has become embedded within the workplace culture.
Our health system is fully accredited against the mandatory national standards until 2018. This does not sound like a health service that is failing.
I am not going to stand here and say there is no work to be done within our hospital or healthcare system. There is. This is one of the most challenging services of public policy and public service delivery.
I acknowledge the recent KPMG report on the medical training culture and the need to make improvements in this area. I have made this a key focus. In response to this report, I established a clinical culture committee with key clinicians from within the hospital. The committee will be responsible for addressing this issue—which, as I observed in question time today, is not unique or isolated to our hospital but is endemic across all training hospitals across Australia. The first meeting of this committee occurred last night. I am confident that the group will make the changes necessary to improve our training culture. Canberra Hospital is not any different from other training hospitals; these issues stem from years—decades, decades upon decades—of training culture and behaviour, behaviour that needs to change. The problems will not be fixed immediately, but the government has established the framework to fix them, and we will continue to work at removing this form of inappropriate behaviour from the workplace.
Overall, we have a health service to be proud of. And the community agrees. In 2014-15 we received 3,501 compliments. This is more than 300 per cent of the number of complaints received for the same period. It clearly shows that the people of Canberra appreciate and recognise the value of our health service.
Access to service and timely delivery of service remain key priorities for me. In the weeks and months ahead, I will be making further announcements about how we continue to improve in this area of service delivery but today I simply signal that we have a health system we can be proud of. It has its challenges and it has its issues to be addressed, but it is not the picture painted by those opposite. I commend my amendment to the Assembly.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (5.22): It is clear that if you sit down and put “Canberra Hospital” into your favourite search section you can unearth quite a range of concerning stories. What we seem to have before us today is quite a list. I certainly do not want to minimise the issues before us today because it is clear there are serious issues within the culture of ACT Health and that these issues have had implications for both staff and accreditation and, at worst, patient care.
While I note, as Mr Hanson does, that these issues have been discussed in the media for some time each story was mostly focused on a single area or unit and each new story brought with it a government response that sought to address the individual concerns relevant to each area. In a system as broad and complex as ACT Health I
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