Assess ambulance chief over bullying: report

A report into the troubled NSW ambulance service today recommended that the CEO, Greg Rochford, urgently meet the NSW Minister for Health, John Della Bosca, to assess his performance after a disturbing inquiry into bullying and harassment in the service.

The draft report into the management and operations of the Ambulance Service of NSW had recommended Mr Rochford be replaced but that was not supported by all members of the upper house committee.

The chairwoman of the committee, Robyn Parker said after tabling the report that the inquiry into the service showed that ambulance management and government had "brushed under the carpet" serious issues affecting the mental health of paramedics for 10 years.

She said there were nine suicides of which the inquiry knew.

She said Mr Rochford appeared to be "completely unaware" of the extent of bullying and harassment in the service.

"He came and said he was saddened and distressed. Well, this has been going on for 10 years," she said.

"I think if this Government ignores this once more I think we will have a terrible situation."

The report also recommended that Mr Della Bosca and the Director-General of NSW Health Debora Picone meet Mr Rochford quarterly to review progress in relation to reducing bullying and harassment in the service and that the progress be reported to Parliament in the same way that the fire and police services are required to do.

Ms Parker said so many officers contacted the committee in a distressed state that a mental health protocol was established to deal with them.

"This inquiry found that management and government had failed to act over 10 years. Dozens of reviews, dozens of reports and ambulance officers [are] still continuing to suffer from bullying and harassment," she said.

"We have a senior management and successive health ministers who want to brush this under the carpet. This report says enough is enough."

But deputy chairwoman Christine Robertson said that government members of the committee did not agree with many of the report's conclusions.

She described the report as "one sided" because it did not recognise the operational change already achieved and because a lot of evidence was confidential.

The inquiry received 261 submissions, twice that of the recent parliamentary inquiry into Royal North Shore Hospital.

A spokesman for the Health Minister said: "The minister already meets with Mr Rochford regularly and they discuss key performance indicators for the Ambulance Service."

He said he had not had the opportunity to read the report as yet.

Opposition health spokeswoman Jillian Skinner said the Government must not ignore this report because the service was "stretched to breaking point".

"If the Premier [Nathan Rees] wants to get real he needs to force his Health Minister [John Della Bosca] to act on all of these recommendations as a starting point," she said.

Mistakes caused 61 hospital deaths

Serious medical mistakes have caused the deaths of 61 people at western Sydney hospitals over the past two years, according to internal Health Department documents.

The reports, obtained under Freedom of Information, reviewed medical errors at western Sydney hospitals and found most of the avoidable deaths were due to delays in responding to a rapidly deteriorating patient.

In three cases last year, surgical material or instruments were left inside patients.

The Opposition's health spokeswoman, Jillian Skinner, says the findings are disturbing.

"I know that people are dying in hospitals through avoidable causes because this has been partly reported," she said.

"But the extent of this is really shocking and I think Reba Meagher has got some answering to do today."

Professor Steven Boyages from the Sydney West Area Health Service says there are lessons that can be learned from the errors.

"How do we address the issue is the key lesson that we have to take away from these individual cases," he said.

Health Minister Reba Meagher is not commenting on the report's findings.

Asia Pacific must tackle child mortality

A new United Nations report on infant and child mortality has some blunt messages for governments in the Asia Pacific region.

It says they must spend more on health services, reduce the income gap and slow the pace of privatisation in the health sector.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) report for Asia and the Pacific says Asia's economic growth over recent decades has been the key to lowering infant and child mortality rates across the region.

UNICEF's regional director for Asia and the Pacific, Anupama Rao Singh, said the region has made great strides in lowering infant and child mortality rates since the 1970s but warns in recent years the gains have been parred.

"The good dimension is that there has been progress in the decline of infant and child mortality rates if you compare it from the 1970s to date," he said.

"Many countries are on track to achieving the millennium development goal of reducing infant and child mortality by two thirds by 2015.

"This progress has tended to taper off in the last 15 to 17 years. The 70s and 80s saw a much more rapid decline."

But there are major challenges in which public policy in Asia is making it much harder for infant mortality goals to be reached.

Public health systems are under-resourced and financed with less than 1 per cent of government budgets invested in the sector, while income disparities are also widening.

The report warns that if Asia Pacific fails to extend essential services to the poor and marginalised groups as well as making efforts to narrow income disparities, it may result in one million child deaths in the region in 2015.