Wednesday, 29 November 2023

Health system

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (18:15): (641) My adjournment matter this evening is for the attention of the Minister for Health, and it is in relation to reports today around a staff survey at Bendigo Health. I want to put on record my thanks to Bendigo Health for conducting this survey amongst their staff. I think that is great leadership, and it shows that the health service is really trying to get to the bottom of issues that are affecting staff and what their concerns are so they can therefore improve them. So even though some of the findings were quite alarming, I do think that it is a very good thing that this health service is out there and undertaking these surveys.

I am reading from some quotes: ‘massive safety risk’, ‘threat to patient safety’ and ‘moral distress’ are phrases used by unidentified Bendigo Health workers responding to the experience survey that I have referred to, and I am talking about the electronic patient record. A few months ago we had the debate around electronic patient records, and there were concerns around data, there were concerns around the lack of an ability to FOI and a range of other concerns in relation to integration with health services and how the government would be doing this. What this survey has shown is that there are some very challenging issues arising out of the electronic patient record, but what I am very concerned about are issues around medication safety components, and there are various comments made around that:

The drug chart is significantly difficult to read and interpret, often misleading the nursing staff to actual dosages prescribed, leading to many and multiple drug errors that have significantly affected patients ‍…

That is one response from a nurse, and I think that should absolutely set off alarm bells for the minister in relation to those medical errors that are occurring. We know through COVID, just through issues that were arising, that medical errors led to the death of patients. We know that. That happened in the Northern Hospital emergency department – a medication error led to the death of a healthy middle-aged man in shocking and tragic circumstances.

What I am now concerned about is the lack of transparency from the government around the latest sentinel report. They will not tell us how many children have died. In the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee last week we got some very revealing figures around the 20 Victorians that have died in the last two years because they could not get an ambulance and the 1395 Victorians on the waitlist who died before they got their elective surgery. What I would like the minister to provide to me and the action I seek is for the minister to provide the number of sentinel events of the 240 that were reported in the 2021–22 report that were due to medication errors.