In “The Age” this morning:
https://todayspaper.smedia.com.au/theage/shared/ShowArticle.aspx?doc=AGE%2F2020%2F07%2F18&entity=Ar00501&sk=316F962E&mode=text
There are strong views being expressed that the government organisational structure of Victoria’s health services makes it impossible to manage effectively.
Quote:
‘David Davis, the minister for health under the Baillieu and Napthine governments, says the pandemic has exposed structural deficiencies in the Department of Health and Human Services created, in part, by the government’s decision to merge two separate bureaucracies back into a single mega department.
‘He believes the department is simply too big and complex to manage and attempts to do so have been hampered by the Premier’s tendency to direct its operations through his own office.‘‘The department and minister have comprehensively mismanaged the COVID response,’’ Davis says.
‘Others who have worked within DHHS defend its structure and point out that, in a public health crisis, organisational charts have little relevance to how decisions are made, invariably in very quick time, when confronting changed circumstances on the ground.
‘In times of peace, let alone a pandemic, it would be a difficult task to track decision making and accountability through the reporting lines of the sprawling DHHS, an organisation with a $27 billion budget and more than 11,000 employees
‘Ms Peake, a smart, talented bureaucrat appointed to the role with limited management experience, is normally sandwiched between five ministers she answers to and 10 deputy secretaries who report to her.
‘Professor Lindsay Grayson, an infectious diseases expert, wrote last week that Victoria’s health department was ‘‘one of the worst funded and dysfunctionally organised’’ in the nation. [I would say without question that my state, Tasmania, also falls into that category.]
‘Whether Victoria is paying a terrible cost for that dysfunction is now a matter of vital importance.’
