Page 4524 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 31 October 2018
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I understand that there are some quite substantial and important recommendations in that report, and I look forward to seeing the report and the government’s response to it. I understand that the report goes to fundamental elements of providing a safe, well-managed, productive workplace, and a service with well-qualified and adequate staffing. I am glad that we have this report, and I note from Mr Rattenbury’s revised amendment that we will, as a result of this motion today, see this report. But it is a little surprising that it took a bad accreditation process for Mr Rattenbury and ACT Health to embark on this assessment and to get the outcome that we need. This should be standard practice. We should constantly want to improve our service, and we should be looking at these things rather than waiting for an adverse accreditation report before we deal with them.
I could speak at length about the issues surrounding violence against staff in our mental health system. No motion in relation to mental health and Mental Health Month could go by without discussing these issues. We have seen many alarming recent reports about the number and frequency of violent attacks made on mental health staff. I was quite taken aback, actually, when I listened recently to Matthew Daniel, the branch secretary of the ANMF, on ABC radio, at his quiet fury that could not be disguised when he spoke about his disappointment with the minister, the government and the bureaucracy in dealing with these issues.
Mr Daniel and I do not necessarily agree on everything, but as an advocate for the safety of a workplace, he was doing a stellar job. He could not disguise his anger that his members were being beaten up and threatened in such a way on such a regular basis. The passion with which he spoke on ABC radio should have made the minister pause.
More recently than that, in the last week or so, we have seen a story on ABC Online, and it was also on the ABC Sunday news, where members of staff have spoken out for themselves. One nurse at Dhulwa warned that “somebody is going to die” unless staff conditions improved. Staff are scared to go to work, and feel management is ignoring their concerns. One staff member said, “You feel like you’re on your own.” Jane—and that is not her real name—said, “It is not the assaults themselves but the way they are managed and responded to that inflicts the most damage.” She said, “It’s minimising the assaults; coming in and saying, ‘Let’s forget about that. Let’s move on’.”
The day after the story broke, the executive director of mental health, justice health and alcohol and drug services sent a long, and I can only say bureaucratic, email to staff. The email said absolutely nothing about getting in front of the problem. It was all about reaction—letting the problem happen and then dealing with it later. It offered staff nothing that would provide them and their patients with a safer environment. One staff member said to the ABC, “We just want to be safe. We want our patients to be safe.”
Then there is mental health in the emergency department as well. Only recently, we saw an extreme emergency situation in which a patient managed to access a police side-arm and discharge it multiple times inside the hospital. We have seen incidents in
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