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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-09-21 Daily Xml
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Coronial Investigations

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:54): My question is to the Minister for Health. Will the minister now review the Health Care Act to consider the concerns of the Coroner when he raised the difficulty in receiving relevant information into his court to fulfil their role in investigating deaths?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (14:54): I am sure I have answered this question before, and the answer hasn't changed. There are a couple of issues. Obviously, we made changes—they were proclaimed changes—with regard to the safety learning system entries being, essentially, protected under the Health Care Act. We did that a couple of weeks ago, and those changes are now in force. They weren't really related to issues raised by the Coroner. They were because of recommendations arising from the review into the chemotherapy issues, and being able to provide information to patients and other clinicians.

With regard to the specific issues raised by the Coroner, his issue has been about having access to the root cause analysis which is done after there has been an adverse event. A priority, if there is an adverse event, is to quickly get to the heart of the matter, find out why it occurred, and make sure that we rectify anything that needs to be rectified to make sure that it isn't repeated.

It has been a very longstanding bipartisan position under both Labor and Liberal governments—not only here in South Australia, but right around the country—that those root cause analyses are protected. The reason for that is that we need clinicians who have been involved in that adverse event to speak freely about why the adverse event happened, including any mistakes they may well have made. If those RCAs are not protected, then clinicians won't say anything which may, potentially, incriminate them, and we will have a very long and drawn-out process to get to the bottom of why an adverse event happened.

That's fine in, for example, the AHPRA investigations—an AHPRA investigation with regard to what happened, whether a clinician should be deregistered or not—but when we are in a hospital and an adverse event happens, it is important we get to the heart of it quickly, find out what went wrong, and get it fixed as soon as we possibly can. That is why there has always been, under both governments—both political parties—a bipartisan position on root cause analysis having that protection under the Health Care Act. It is something that has never been disputed within parliament.

The Coroner, I know, has a different point of view, and I respect that. That is not something, to my understanding, that is shared by any other coroners in any other jurisdictions, and I certainly do not have any plans to change the Health Care Act so that root cause analyses lose their protection. Having said that, of course, we will always work with the Coroner to try to overcome any particular issues that he has, but we certainly won't be removing the protection that currently exists under the Health Care Act for those RCAs.

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