Coronavirus Australia: Flawed culture blinded DHHS to contact tracing failures, quarantine inquiry hears

A flawed culture within Victoria’s health department blinded it to contact tracing failures, a parliamentary inquiry has heard.

President of AMA Victoria Julian Rait. Picture: Supplied

A flawed culture within Victoria’s health department blinded it to the failures of the state’s contact tracing regimen, a parliamentary inquiry has heard.

Australia Medical Association Victoria president Julian Rait told an inquiry scrutinising the state’s contact tracing system on Monday that the Department of Health and Human Services tended to “keep imperfection to themselves”.

“DHHS has to be less defensive and learn to benchmark its performance against other states,” he said.

“The community has a right to know as much as possible about its contact tracing system, including its resourcing, staffing, benchmarks and its performance,” he said.

“The culture in medicine is perfectionism but always seeking to continuously improve even if that means some loss of face, some humility and that this is what’s very frustrating. “

Victoria’s contact tracing system has attracted national scrutiny after it failed to contain the state’s second wave, which sentenced Melbourne to months in lockdown and claimed the lives of 800 people.

Professor Rait said the outbreak at Cedar Meats in the west Melbourne suburb of Brooklyn would have been handled better if DHHS had engaged local general practitioners in their response, noting there was a respiratory clinic about 4km down the road from the abattoir.

“Expert local knowledge can benefit the state’s contact tracing efforts, particularly in multicultural communities,” he said.

“It can speed up the process of informing of possible new cases, but unfortunately we still have a way to go before general practice is meaningfully included in contact tracing and case management.

Professor Rait said culturally and linguistic diverse communities, which have proven a challenge for contact tracers, would trust their local GP but were suspicious of government officials.

The inquiry heard that a tech giant that has now been engaged to digitise Victoria’s contact tracing unit first approached DHHS in March but were not engaged to assist in the fight against the second wave until the end of July.

Salesforce Australia and New Zealand chief executive officer Pip Marlow said the company approached Victorian officials pitching their capabilities along with governments around the world.

“We did reach out to Victoria and other jurisdictions around the 30th of March,” she said.

“We then continued through a period of time to continue to share our capabilities and leanings.”

When asked if she could provide the email correspondence between Salesforce and DHHS, Ms Marlow said she’d have to take the question on notice.

She declined to speculate on why it took five-months for DHHS to engage the tech giant.

Deakin University chair of epidemiology Catherine Bennett said she discovered information on the DHHS website was incorrect when she underwent testing for the coronavirus a couple of weeks ago.

“It actually didn’t have the correct road that the test site was in,” she said.

Professor Bennett said the state’s contact tracing system had improved and most people received test results within 24-hours.