Top bureaucrats warned a year ago Victoria's key public health...

Top bureaucrats warned a year ago Victoria's key public health team was starved of money and staff
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Sumeyya Ilanbey and Richard Baker
July 29, 2020 — 11.30pm

Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton's team was so poorly funded that top bureaucrats warned the Andrews government multiple times the state's public health unit was the worst resourced in the country.

While the alarm was sounded in May 2019, according to documents seen by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, the Department of Health and Human Services still had only 14 contact tracers by the time coronavirus took hold in Australia in March.

The government was put on notice about the poor state of its public health team last year when the DHHS document comparing Victoria’s resourcing to NSW and Queensland was circulated as part of a push for extra funding.


Premier Daniel Andrews, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton and Health Minister Jenny Mikakos prepare to give a coronavirus update this week.CREDITARRIAN TRAYNOR

The document, which describes the main role of a public health team as “preventing the transmission of communicable diseases [and] managing outbreaks”, gives a stark assessment of Victoria’s preparedness.

Several DHHS sources claim the government’s difficulties in getting the second deadly wave of coronavirus under control could be linked to ongoing problems with contact tracing, including the recruitment of inexperienced staff and reliance on an outdated and inefficient phone and paper-based IT system.

Public health officers in the department's communicable disease and prevention control unit had been managing high case loads for many years, according to the documents.

“PHOs [public health officers] in the CDPC [Communicable Disease and Prevention Control] Unit in Victoria have been managing much higher case load numbers and had higher population ratios than similar staff in other states and territories, with the number of PHO staff in Victoria half the size of ... (New South Wales),” it warned.

“In other words, a doubling of current staff numbers would still see Victoria as the least resourced state in terms of staff undertaking public health officer duties.”

Senior government figures told members of Victoria's public health team that the state was achieving the same outcomes as other jurisdictions without committing the same resources.

“Unfortunately the main outcome for successful public health is the absence of disease, and it has taken the pandemic to lay bare the true deficiencies in the Victoria system,” a DHHS source said this week.

According to the documents, Victoria had just six physicians in its health protection branch compared to 24 in NSW and 17 in Queensland.

Victoria's contact tracing deficiencies have been exposed during the second wave of the pandemic, in which close contacts of confirmed COVID-19 cases report waiting days and weeks to be notified by DHHS. A DHHS spokesman said there were about 2000 people “supporting” the contact tracing team since the coronavirus outbreak.

“Our massive team of disease detectives is working around the clock to find and contain coronavirus – and we are grateful for the recent support provided by our interstate and federal colleagues to boost our contact tracing efforts,” the spokesman said.

“We’ve deployed doctors, nurses, medical students, and now paramedics and ADF personnel as part of our growing contact tracing team – with well over 2000 people now undertaking this vital work.