Thursday, 17 August 2023

Safer Care Victoria

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (17:26): (410) My adjournment matter this evening is for the attention of the Minister for Health, and it relates to an issue I raised in the house this week around sentinel events that have happened in Victoria’s hospitals and the latest report released by the government, the 2021–22 Sentinel Events Annual Report. As I said earlier this week, this report is actually very scant. It is lacking detail. It has got lots of half-blank pages and lots of pictures but nothing about the real issue at hand, and that is how many Victorians have died in our hospitals because of issues that arose through the course of their care. To improve the system we need to understand exactly what has gone on. I did also reference earlier this week that back in 2007 when the now Premier was the health minister he said:

It is vital that our services report on these events, so that we can learn from them and endeavour to reduce such tragedies in the future.

That is really what this report should be about. What have we learned from the terrible and tragic events that have occurred in our hospitals? Very little. This article that I am referring to, ‘Surgery blunder among public hospital mistakes’, from the Age in December 2007, goes through deaths from error, 38, including 11 suicides and three medication errors; procedures on wrong person or body part, 20; instruments left inside patient post surgery, eight; and other catastrophic events.

Yesterday in the lower house my colleague Emma Kealy asked on my behalf a question around Casey Hospital, where just a few years ago, 10 years after that report, there were six paediatric deaths and the government undertook a review. That was in 2016–17. I am pleased that the minister has written back to my colleague and said that all of the 41 recommendations and 51 actions from the review at the Casey Hospital have been implemented. But we have still got concerns. We have still got 767 findings, 556 lessons learned and 240 sentinel events, out of which 38 children have been affected, and the government will not tell us how many children have died. Out of those 240 sentinel events, how many Victorians have died? I think we have a right to know. I think we need to understand how many issues have gone on. How many medication errors? How many wrong body parts were operated on? How many children have died? Actually, there were 1149 recommendations, so the action I seek tonight is a full explanation of the 767 findings, the 556 lessons learned and the 1149 recommendations and a full, detailed account of how many children died and how many Victorians died.