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Parliamentary Questions


Question Without Notice No. 726 asked in the Legislative Assembly on 10 November 2021 by Ms L. Mettam

Parliament: 41 Session: 1

PERTH CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL — AISHWARYA ASWATH

726. Ms L. METTAM to the Minister for Health:

I have a supplementary question. Minister, why is it that everyone understands and acknowledges that staffing was an issue, including the director general of your own department, on the tragic night of Aishwarya Aswath's death, except you, the person with responsibility for this area?

Mr R.H. COOK replied:

Madam Speaker, once again, the member for Vasse is wrong. It does not matter how many times we come into this place and explain and step through these issues, day in and day out, she does not seem capable of actually digesting the information put before her. As we have said time and again, there was a full roster of staff on that evening. It is for the public record that they were looking at the reconfiguration of staff inside that emergency department, as they realised both the impact of demand and the impact of the design of that ED, and, in relation to demand, the impact of high adolescent mental health presentations and respiratory syncytial virus at that particular time of the year. All those things were compounded by the problems associated with our COVID-19 border closure and the fact that that impacted on our capacity to broaden our workforce to ensure that we had adequate backup for the staff who were in that ED. That led to a situation whereby staff were obviously continuing to feel fatigued and under the pump, as is every single doctor and nurse in this country today. There was an adequate number of people on roster that night.

The report by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care laid out the whole range of circumstances that led up to the very sad issues associated with Aishwarya's passing on 3 April. They were multifactorial. There was a range of contextual issues that impacted on things on that particular evening. But the fact of the matter remains that a little girl presented to the emergency department with sepsis and, within one and a half hours, succumbed to that disease. That is incredibly sad. We are all making sure that we learn from that experience to ensure to the extent that we can that it does not happen again.