Without data it’s up to the unions to identify ‘hugely important’ gaps in the system. And the Special Commissioner agrees, saying citizens had the 'right to know'.
NSW Health is hesitant to provide comprehensive data on staff vacancies across its facilities, according to a Health Services Union official.
Testifying before the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry into Healthcare funding, Dr Duncan Halsen, HSU division secretary for strategy, research and projects said the union had resorted to lodging formal requests under the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 due to the department’s reticence to share “valid, current data” on vacancy rates across its various workforces.
“Whether it’s in direct discussions with the hospital’s HR department, whether it’s a formal GIPA application, there is a sense of obstruction that is sometimes picked up by our union, in terms of being able to ascertain this data,” Dr Halse said.
“I suspect that much of it exists … in the system, that information is there, but to our knowledge it’s not publicly available. It’s not collated in a methodical manner and presented to the public [in a way that] provides confidence to the public with respect to the operation and the performance of a health service.
“We tendered a document to this inquiry, which was a GIPA application which pertained to NSW Ambulance asking that body [if] it could identify staff vacancies.
“The response we received was, ‘no data exists’.
“For us as an industrial body it was an alarming response … we think that it’s a wholly reasonable application to make on a critical area of NSW Health to be aware of staff vacancies.
“Without having access to accurate data on vacancies … groups like ours will have to identify gaps in the system.
“So it will be a [union] delegate or an organiser who will identify that a particular hospital service is short-staffed.
“And it will require the activism or the engagement of a trade union like ours to rectify an issue that might have been overcome if data sets [were] available to inform policy makers.”
According to Dr Halse, establishing an independent reporting body or mechanism dedicated to collecting and reporting “contemporaneous” data on staff vacancies across NSW Health facilities, either contained within the Bureau of Health Information (BHI) or using a “similar model”, was vital to ensuring policy makers had the requisite information to deliver improvements at a systemic level.
“If we’re simply relying upon the existing national data sets and state data sets, they present good information on headcounts, they present good information of the number of a particular worker within a particular LHD or location.
“But when we’re talking about according the responsibilities of the health service and meeting KPIs, the role of staff vacancies is hugely important, [and currently] we don’t have clear information on an integral question like workforce vacancies or staff vacancies,” he said.
“Data should be contemporaneous and real-time – for example, a data set captured over the course of the year with multiple intervals, a bit like what the BHI [captures].
“The more transparent, clear and accurate the data that can be presented broadly to the community, but also to health experts, policymakers – those in the political class will aid in the design of more equitable, more accessible health systems and services.”
Commissioner Richard Beasely SC was emphatic in his support for the public release of workforce vacancy data via the BHI or another independent entity, arguing that the onus was on NSW Health to prove that doing so could pose any particularly negative consequences.
“Every citizen of New South Wales ought to be able to know, I would have thought, what the vacancy rates for particular positions in the public medical workforce, regardless of the position,” he said.
“There’s a lot of stuff that the government keeps secret that [arguably] there’s no good reason, other than a political one, for it [to be] kept secret from us, but it’d be nice to know that there’d be a good reason for it.”
NSW Health legal counsel Richard Cheney SC objected to Dr Halse and Mr Beasely’s comments regarding the need to publicly release data on workforce vacancies across the state’s public hospitals and facilities, insisting unsuccessfully, that doing so risked violating the department’s obligations surrounding commercial sensitivity.
“In circumstances where, among other things, my client is competing with similar organisations in other states for recruitment data, there may well be aspects of this that are commercially sensitive,” Mr Cheney said.
“For example, if it’s perceived that there’s an inordinate number of vacancies in a particular LHD or region, that may well feed into the expectation of those who might otherwise be interested in filling those roles.”
“There’ll no doubt be pros and cons to releasing any information to the public about the health system, but I can’t quite see how it’s acutely commercially sensitive at the moment,” Mr Beasely responded.
“I can think, for example, the people involved in local government, particularly in regional rural LHDs, might want to know what the vacancy rates are in the health workforce, because they’re the people that get hauled up in supermarkets and in the streets, [being] told ‘there’s not enough ‘x’ in our hospital,’ they have to answer those questions to residents of their local government areas.”