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.