Posted: 5:34 pm on 13th April 2012
In the wake of the release of my report Charlatan Training: How Aboriginal Health Workers are Being Short-changed, I have been accused of calling Aboriginal Health Workers (AHWs) charlatans. This statement grossly misinterprets what I said. I did not blame Aboriginal health workers; rather, I blamed the system and the Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) for failing AHWs with substandard training. The fact that some AHWs - with Certificate IV in Aboriginal…
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Posted: 8:00 am on 10th April 2012
In the last 15 years, there have been four major revisions of the governance structure of NSW Health in a futile effort to address longstanding dissatisfaction with the centralised Area Health Service administrative system. Originally, there had been 23 metropolitan and 23 country area health services in the mid-1980s. The Carr government cut the number to nine and eight respectively in 1997. In 2005, then Minister for Health Morris Iemma…
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Posted: 12:56 pm on 3rd March 2012
In a time honoured tradition of burying unwelcome news (and it’s not even Melbourne Cup Day!) the Gillard government released this week — late in the afternoon on perhaps the biggest news day of the year — the National Advisory Council on Dental Health’s recommendations on a new government funded dental system. This might seem like cause for concern, but in fact champions of transparency can take comfort in the fact that…
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Posted: 12:34 pm on 27th February 2012
The Gillard v. Rudd leadership contest has confirmed a lot of bad impressions about Australian politics. The political class – including most of the media commentariat – are clearly preoccupied with the perks, machinations, and personalities of politics at the expense of focusing on public administration, including the critical area of policy formation. Given the good economic fortunes created by the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and the China-led…
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Posted: 8:00 am on 23rd January 2012
An article published this week by the former head of the Professional Services Review (PSR) in the Medical Journal of Australia generated much needed debate about the wisdom and sustainability of Medicare. According to Dr Tony Webber, Medicare rorts are costing taxpayers between $2 billion and $3 billion every year because of over-servicing and other dodgy billing and clinical practices. The PSR is a peer-review process that investigates suspicious conduct…
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