Page 4631 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 27 November 2019
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MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I thank Ms Lee for the supplementary, and I will take the detail of the question on notice. I am not convinced about the way the opposition is phrasing this matter. These are incredibly sensitive and personal issues, and we need to be very careful in the language we use in relation to them. I will take the detail of the question on notice in relation to how these sensitive matters of terminating pregnancies are managed by the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children.
ACT Health—workplace culture
MRS KIKKERT: My question is to the Minister for Health. Minister, in your ministerial statement on 26 September about the implementation of the recommendations of the culture review, you said that significant work was being done “in identifying where executive staff need further support and working with them to ensure they have the skills and capabilities to support their teams”. Minister, why are these skills and capabilities not core eligibility requirements and selection criteria for executive staff appointments?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I thank Mrs Kikkert for the question. Of course we are doing a lot of work to respond to the independent review of workplace culture within ACT public health services. We are constantly reviewing the capability of executive staff across the system. What we have seen in relation to health services is that often people are promoted, as they are in many technical areas, on the basis of their technical skill, on the basis of their clinical skill and on the basis of how they have done the job at the level that they have been at.
One of the things that have come out both from the culture review itself and from the work that we are doing collaboratively with the ANU school of management and the earlier conversations that they have had with people is that there has not been enough focus in the past within Canberra Health Services and the Health Directorate on ensuring that when people are promoted into those management positions they are actually provided with the professional development and support to be good managers. They may be technically excellent. They may be very good at providing the clinical services that they provide. In those kinds of areas we often see people promoted on the basis of those skills and not enough attention being paid to their capacity to be leaders and managers of staff. That is something that has been identified and it is something that we are addressing.
MRS KIKKERT: Minister, why was it necessary for an independent review to be conducted to remind the government, and you, that executives need to have skills and capabilities in team leadership?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I thank Mrs Kikkert for the supplementary. I find it interesting that the opposition is choosing to ask questions about leadership this week. But leaving that to one side, as I just said, we see these things across many technical areas and many areas where people provide clinical services or specialist services, where people are promoted on the basis of their clinical skills, their specialist skills or their technical skills. It is absolutely a core responsibility of organisations to ensure that people have those management and leadership skills. It is something that
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