In the last 15-20 years the whole world has been changed by how developments in technology have changed the means of communication.
It’s been changed the most in how it’s so easy to find out what people and organisations are really like – just send them an email. And for what they’re really like to be made available to the whole world.
We could provide hundreds of examples of this, but here’s one.
For 10 years, up until 30 Jun 2015, Kieran Pehm was the NSW Health Care Complaints Commissioner, and he was indescribably hopeless, and the Health Care Complaints Commission under him was indescribably hopeless!
(Of course, the equivalent in the legal field, Steve Mark, was worse!)
As evidence of this, the HCCC gets over a thousand complaints about doctors a year, and in terms of their media releases how many a year are found to have done not a very good job? – about eight! 50,000 doctors in NSW and about eight a year are found to have done not a very good job! And in each of these eight cases it’s usually 3-5 years from the complaint until the media release. This is called “regulation!!!!”
As we said, there is “evidence” of this – all of it on the world wide web for everyone to see. 20 years ago this wouldn’t have been the case.
So we emailed Sue Dawson, who was appointed the new Health Care Complaints Commissioner on 7 Dec 2015, asking if anything was likely to be different under her to how they had been under Kieran Pehm. She delegated the task of responding to our question to one of her underlings, and about 15 emails later, in which we were often treated as idiots, no answer has been given. So we know exactly what Sue Dawson is like.
And this sort of thing is going to change the world. Everyone is going to be more accountable. It’s going to be a very different place in 20 years time, perhaps even in 10 years.
At present, when the HCCC produces an annual report, the present NSW Minister for Health, Jillian Skinner, comes out and says, “Oh yes! They’re doing a really good job.”
We doubt whether the NSW Minister for Health, whoever he or she is in 20 years time, will be saying this unless things have changed – it will be too obvious to too many people that such a statement is idiotic.
And, again, unless things have changed, the people of NSW will have realised that their health care system is completely unregulated – that they just have to look after themselves.