To us what is described in this Sydney Morning Herald article is quite extraordinary – about which we will write more later.
Having read it, to a certain extent we were pleasantly surprised, and certainly excited, to find that the Concord Government hospital, at least now, has an ordinary email address that can be used to send letters to it’s top management, hopefully! Perhaps things are changing. Of course, whether anyone is ever going to respond to emails sent using it, is another question.
This has lead us to use it to send this:-
Oops! Of all the dirty low down tricks!!!!!! After all the time we’ve spent drafting this post, working on the assumption that when we’ve been invited twice on this page to use an ordinary email address – concordinfo@email.cs.nse.gov.au – that it would work. And then we find that it doesn’t work at all!!!!! We’ve tried 4 different ways of using it to send an email, and each time, we get back, “Host or domain name not found,” within a few seconds. When will we learn to stop being so naive in dealing with these bastards?
Perhaps we’ll just publish what we’ve written anyway and see what happens.
While it’s obvious a lot of good work is being done by a lot of good people in government hospitals, nevertheless, to a large extent these people are not really accountable, as is true of lots of the people generally in the health care industry, and the whole world generally – this, at a time when ordinary emails have come along which have the capacity to make people extraordinarily accountable
To anyone with a legal back ground it’s like being able to cross-examine people in court, and letting them be judged by how they respond. You couldn’t get anything fairer than that.
But the problem is that while you can be finding what people are like till the cows come home, it still depends to large extent on what people with power do about the things that are found out.
And in this respect, under the present State government:-
If you want to involve our State Premier in doing things about things, all you can do is use one of those wretched email forms and unless you provide your full personal details, name, address, and phone number, even if on the most general of questions, she seems to think that she’s excused from responding. It’s as though she’s saying, “I will not be cross-examined on this.” Perhaps even, “I don’t care!”
And it’s probably true of our minister for health Brad Hazzard – it was certainly true of his predecessor Jillian Skinner.
And it’s certainly true of local members of Parliament like Geoff Lee, the local Member for Parramatta.
It’s as though some brain dead person, somewhere along the line, came up with, “If people won’t provide us with all their full personal details, we are excused from responding to their concerns – surely the people will accept that.” And every one in the government has followed. Well it’s up to us, the people, to make them realise that this is something that we WON’T accept – if they won’t provide reasonable responses to our reasonable emails, we won’t vote for them, no matter what excuses they may come up with.
In the meantime, we have a Coroner being quoted as saying the fact that a 13 year old boy was wheeled in a wheelchair to his family’s car, (because he was too sick to walk,) at 2.20 in the morning, and told “Off you go,” to be dead within 13 hours, was “not due to any deficiency on the part of Concord Hospital’s staff or it’s systems” – something we, the people, learnt more than 3 years, 3 months and 20 days later, when the Coroner’s report was made public.