Free from the trammels of embargoes and publishing delays, Cohealth review lead Professor Stephen Duckett has finally had his say.
Just hours after the official release of the Cohealth review he led, Professor Stephen Duckett has spoken out on Melbourne radio, saying he and his co-authors may have proposed two options for the troubled community care organisation’s management, but there really was only one choice, going forward.
“They’ve had their chance. They’ve got to go,” Professor Duckett said yesterday on ABC’s Melbourne Drive show.
“We said, look, there are really two ways you could go. You could either say to the Board of Cohealth and the management of Cohealth, we’re going to give you time to lift your game.
“Or you can say to the board, well, you’ve had your chance and you’ve got to go.
“In the end, we recommended the second, that is, they’ve had their chance, they’ve got to go,” he said.
“We said that because we had really no confidence that the board, as it currently is constituted, would actually do what needs to be done, or had the skills [to do] what needs to be done, had the skills to hold management to account.”
Professor Duckett said Cohealth’s submission to the review said that the management recognised that it had made some mistakes.
“But all the mistakes were about communication, and I thought, come on. Look at what we’ve heard, look at the numbers, and you just don’t understand what the problems are, and that’s why we took the hard-line recommendation,” he said.
Professor Duckett said the review authors had “lifted the lid and looked inside”, finding that the relationship between Cohealth’s doctors and the management was “appalling”.
He also said that while other community health organisations in Melbourne had their problems, they were “nowhere near as bad as Cohealth”.
“When we started this review, we said, why is Cohealth such a mess, and everybody else, all the other community health centres in Melbourne seem to be going along okay.
“It stood out that Cohealth is quite different from the other community health services.”
Dr Stephen Alomes, a representative of the Save our Community Health Campaign was less polite than Professor Duckett about the Cohealth management.
“The most powerful sentence in the whole report is the one in which it calls on Cohealth management to apologise for traumatising staff and clients,” Dr Alomes said.
“It’s been a pretty horrible seven months.
“Cohealth twice blocked the release of the report, and the report we have now … has got many redactions. We don’t know the detail of some of the financial losses. We don’t know the detail of critiques of senior management.”
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Cohealth management, Dr Alomes said, was “very good at games”.
“Their only apology they have ever given said that they made mistakes in communication. They were going to sack 60 staff five days before Christmas, so that is the Cohealth management style.”
Nevertheless, Dr Alomes said, there was trust and love for the frontline workers at Cohealth.
“The other side of the coin is complete disgust with the games the board plays,” he said.
He claimed that Cohealth’s latest move was to employ a disaster management firm, ResilientCo, to “navigate its way through their troubled waters”.
“We do have a board that really is committed to itself … there are a lot of gestures, there are chit-chats and other gestures, but there is no real evidence of engagement with the community,” said Dr Alomes.
