Tasmanian Department of Health COVID-19 North West Regional Hospital Outbreak - Interim Report
AMA Tasmania welcomes this morning’s release of the Tasmanian Department of Health COVID-19 North West Regional Hospital Outbreak - Interim Report.
Professor John Burgess President AMA Tasmania commented 'the release of this report is a helpful first step, and we recognise the time and effort that has gone into the report by the Director of Health and the Chief Medical Officer, but it further underscores the need for an independent commission of inquiry.
"The report describes a vulnerable regional healthcare system that was overwhelmed by events and a broader and governance and public health response that always seemed days behind the curve in its communications and interventions to crush emerging local outbreaks and maintain hospital services.
"This report is the first step in the health system, government and community understanding what went wrong and how we can ensure this never happens again.
“We must remember it is an internal report written at a point in time when we are still progressing through the management of the virus. While it answers some questions, it leaves more unanswered and raises new ones.
"Only an independent review or Commission of Inquiry can get to the bottom of what went wrong and what went right at each step in the management of this crisis from the entry of the infection into Tasmania, to hospital ward response through to the decision-makers at the highest level of the bureaucracy.
"There is little doubt that the north-west hospital system and the community were vulnerable from the outset. Relatively under-resourced and under trained, a delayed high-level systemic response in the early phase of the emergent outbreak appears to have contributed to the outbreak chain reaction.
"This report is very factual but offers little insight or evidence of system introspection as to the contribution higher level bureaucratic processes, communication and responsiveness played in the genesis and progression of the outbreak. There is no clear insight provided into the governance and Public Health policy and process reforms required to prevent a similar outbreak occurring in the future.
"At no time should blame be apportioned to anyone, but we must learn more from this outbreak and its management than this report provides today. We must not let the people whose lives have been lost to this virus in Tasmania be in vain. A fully independent commission of inquiry is required, and it would be highly inappropriate to attribute this outbreak to the decisions, actions and behaviour of front-line healthcare workers.”