AMAV VICDOC SUMMER 2023 - Magazine - Page 16
PHOTOGRAPHY ALBERT COMPER
B
y any measure, the past two and a half
years (what I will call the “COVID years”)
have been a tough time in Australia, for
the community and the healthcare system.
However, I think most of Australia would agree
that Victoria has been impacted more than
other states in terms of overall societal impact.
Of the many questions
one could ask, the two
most important are:
What have we learned
from Victoria’s response;
and when there is a
new infectious diseases
outbreak, will our
public health response
be any different?
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AMA VI C TO RIA
As a society, we would be foolish not to
review how we have responded – not to lay
blame for any mistakes, but instead identify
how our public health and political systems
could do better.
Firstly, by all objective measures, Victoria
entered the COVID pandemic with the worst
funded and most dysfunctionally structured
Department of Health (DOH) in Australia.
Unlike other states, Victoria had a Chief
Health Officer who was solely responsible for
public health and was low down the DOH
organisational structure; a part-time Chief
Medical Officer (CMO) who was in a separate
department and solely responsible for hospitalbased healthcare, and no defined medical
structure to provide coordination between
all facets of the state’s healthcare response
(including general practice, community health,
vaccination policy and aged care). Until recently,
Victoria had many fewer doctors (per capita)
working in the DOH than other states and
although this has lately improved, these
positions are still mostly on short-term
insecure contracts, such that staff retention
has been a critical problem.
Because of poor COVID source-control
and slow contact tracing, COVID spread
more extensively than in other jurisdictions.
In response, Victoria used blunt societal
containment measures such as repeated
lockdowns, the “ring of steel” around
Melbourne and curfews to restrict people
movements and COVID transmission.