PEEL HEALTH CAMPUS — PERSONAL LEAVE
481. Ms L. METTAM to the Minister for Health:
I refer to the transition of Peel
Health Campus back to public sector control next year. In the middle of a pandemic,
with chronic staffing shortages in the system, why will the minister not
guarantee nursing staff that they will be able to transfer their sick leave as
part of this move?
Ms A.
SANDERSON replied:
I am glad the member for Vasse, the
opposition spokesperson for health, has asked a question about Peel Health
Campus. It gives us an opportunity to reflect on why the government made a decision
to bring it back in-house. It has a sad history, and that sad history is a result
of a failed privatisation by a former Liberal–National government in the 1990s. Anyone who remembers Health
Solutions and its tenure of Peel Health Campus—I have worked closely
around that campus for a number of years, alongside my colleague the member for
Bassendean—will remember how it treated its staff, the kind of clinical
outcomes it had, and the ongoing and long-running campaign from the community
and the staff to bring those services back in-house.
We do not have to look far into
recent history to see what a terrible weeping sore it was for the former
Barnett government—when the member for Vasse was in Parliament, in
fact. There was a chaotic performance of whistleblowing. We had a whistleblower
who was then discredited. There were accusations of fraud and some very
uncomfortable and, I think, questionable links to the Liberal Party. A senior
executive of Health Solutions at Peel Health Campus was a Liberal candidate
down there. I remember that campaign. At the same time, they were seeking funds from the Barnett government for
redevelopment. I am surprised the member would ask me a question like
this. It was a very questionable period.
The former government asked Ramsay
Health Care specialists to take over the contract, and I want to thank Ramsay
for its solid steerage of Peel Health Campus over the last few years. It has
done a good job. It has settled it. The clinical outcomes have been better, and
it has been a really good partner to government. That contract came to an end.
After many years of the community and the staff saying, ''We want a publicly
run hospital in Peel'', we made the decision to bring those services
back in-house. I am very proud of that decision. It is a good decision for the
community and for the staff down there.
We are working through the issues.
The contract will be back in-house in August next year. It is 12 months away,
and we are working through the industrial issues around that. We are starting
from the point that we want nursing staff and support staff to have access to
their leave. We are starting from that point, and we are working through the
legal and industrial instruments to do that. I give a commitment to those staff
that we are doing that. We are committed to making this work. We know we are in
a heated employment market. We know it needs to be attractive for them to come
over. But it will be a better employment relationship than they had with Health
Solutions under the previous government's failed privatisation.