“The need for a Royal Commission into the hospital system in the ACT, as called for by the Liberals, is looking more and more necessary,” writes political columnist MICHAEL MOORE. 

Don’t worry! We know the hospital has problems and we are already underway to get them fixed. This response is wearing thin! 

How many times have we heard this over the last couple of decades since Labor came to power?

The ACT operates under the Westminster system of responsible government. The buck stops with the minister. We are way past flicking responsibility to the Canberra Hospital system and need a minister who will find solutions to the constant run of issues at the Canberra Hospital.

This time a draft report from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetrics and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG) has resulted in a temporary accreditation for just six months for training in the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Unit of the Centenary Hospital for Mothers and Babies while the management sorts the “challenges”. Patients are being put at risk.

Similar concerns about management and cultural issues were raised in 2010 and 2014 by RANZCOG.

Then, in 2019, a damning workplace culture review, conducted by Mick Reid, found 12 per cent of staff had been subject to physical harm, sexual harassment or abuse, and more than half of these incidents were perpetrated by a colleague. 

The report pointed out that “disengaged clinicians are often cynical, distrustful of the system, lack pride in their organisation and are unhappy in the workplace”.

That report preceded the appointments of both Rachel Stephen-Smith as Health Minister and Dave Peffer as leader of Canberra Health Services. However, in November 2022 Mr Peffer argued that while culture was on the improve, “the reality is some teams are still struggling. Some are going backwards”.

The buck stops with the minister. As Jon Stanhope and Khalid Amid pointed out in a series of articles in CityNews as recently as 2022, recurrent funding remained “scandalously lower than all other Australian jurisdictions”.

The Chief Minister and Treasurer, Andrew Barr, along with Health Minister Stephen-Smith, love to point to the new hospital infrastructure that they are putting in place over the next decade. Although it is welcomed, the focus of infrastructure does not compare to the importance of appropriate funding to improve the lot of the staff.

It is the hard-working staff that set the culture of the hospital. With funding increasing at less than half the annual Australian growth rate (as per the four years leading to 2018-19) how can things be expected to improve? Even during the covid pandemic the numbers revealed underfunding of ACT hospitals. There was a spending increase of just 2 per cent (the lowest in Australia) while patient numbers rose by 9.1 per cent (the highest in the country).

The response of Canberra Health Services remains the same. They have already made some progress, they are recruiting more staff, they are addressing culture problems, they are ensuring the registrars are operating within their scope of practice… and so on. No one mentions funding shortfalls!

Just over a year ago this column covered the reforms needed in the paediatric areas of the hospital. The pressure on staff across the paediatric (and other areas of health) were enormous. 

Despite herculean efforts, with inadequate staff, things do go wrong. This is why the Paediatrics Organisational and Service Plan at that time, based its “planning horizons” on three fundamentals: “stabilise, strengthen and expand”.

At the time the hospital committed to “appropriate care settings and formalised protocols”. This has been combined with “workforce training and education challenges”. With the deaths of children that have occurred in the hospital, it is amazing these issues have not been addressed by the minister much sooner. 

The same should have been applied right across the Canberra Hospitals system. Easy to say – difficult to implement. This is especially the case when the hospital systems are being forced by their political masters to manage (in real terms) with less and less money. 

There will always be problems in large teaching hospitals and across health systems. However, the constant issues arising in our hospital systems in Canberra, and the extent to which they put patients at risk, does require a significant rethink. The need for a Royal Commission into the hospital system in the ACT, as called for by the Liberals, is looking more and more necessary. 

In our system of government, the buck stops with the Minister. So Minister, what’s next?

Michael Moore is a former member of the ACT Legislative Assembly and an independent minister for health. He has been a political columnist with “CityNews” since 2006.