Page 3264 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 21 August 2018
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
I move:
That the Assembly take note of the papers.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (10.48): I welcome the tabling of this statement today and what is apparently the conclusion of the system-wide data review, somewhat later than the minister promised, as we have all noted previously. Leading Data Reform: The Way Forward speaks a lot about the potential that we have here. It is to be noted that in the minister’s concluding comments she confirmed something I have said on a number of occasions. She confirmed how important it is that we have good health data. She said:
The review has provided ACT Health with the potential—
“Potential,” Madam Speaker—
to transform the delivery of health care in the ACT community.
When this issue first arose, I spoke at length about the importance of health data. Members on the government side kept saying, “It is not important. It is only data. It doesn’t actually relate to patient health and safety.” That went back to 2012, when we had the data doctoring issues. The minister for health at the time said, “It is only data. It doesn’t really impact on people’s health and safety.”
But the minister today puts the lie to all of those claims, all of those brushings off that we have had since 2012, because what the minister says here is that without good data we cannot have optimal health delivery. If we do not have optimal health delivery, we do not have optimal health. Thank you, minister, for at last acknowledging on behalf of successive ACT governments that ACT Health data does matter. It does matter, and without good health data we cannot make the right choices about where we should be spending our health dollar. That is something that at last this government has admitted.
While I welcome this report, I think it also highlights the whole sorry saga of health data operations when you consider that, as the minister outlines on page 7 of her statement, this is the culmination of six or seven years of reviews and counter reviews. As we have seen from the minister’s statement, there are 175 individual recommendations to fix data in the ACT Health system.
We have to remember that there have been two Auditor-General’s reports into health data and, the minister says, six external reviews. I counted five. Actually, I realised when I was thinking about this today that in fact there were six because there was an independent data review at the time of the 2012 Auditor-General’s report that I had not counted. In a very short period of time—most of those were pushed into 2015-16—there have been six independent reviews by accounting companies and two Auditor-General’s reviews. We had 175 recommendations. What we have seen here is an admission that many of those recommendations were not being actioned.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video