Hockrampton

A little insider tale related to the fustercluck the other day where vax recipients were given wrong/unknown doses and have to be re-vaxxed. Let's assume the story is true or at least a little bit true. I've worked in elf there twice, once in the late 80's and again last year. Hocky is not a sexy place and struggles to attract the best and brightest. IIRC Jayant Patel saga and the now infamous CHO Young Jeanette took over as medical director for paperwork though my time there coincides with neither. In the 80s I was young and naive but at least I had a solid 3 year hospital-trained grounding in my discipline. No one else had in a staff of dozens, they had merely been moved from different areas to cover chronic workforce shortages. They were nice people and tried very hard but that core knowledge just wasn't there and they didn't understand the conditions they were dealing with nor the available and chosen treatments. Staffing was complemented by enthusiastic students in an environment that really needs mature, considered decision-making. Unknown to me until several months later there had been a series of errors which had seen the exits of several core staff members, no deaths or anything like that but second-guessed errors of judgement - an analogy would be how much pain relief to give someone, a question of clinical judgement - too little, pain continues, too much, risk of adverse events.
It was a traumatic few months and what I mostly remember is completing incident reports for what you might call run of the mill incidents in that particularly field, but paperwork required to adhere to policies and procedures. As you'll know paperwork takes time and that time would have been better spent supervising the students and the out-of-discipliners. Such commonsense does not exist in the bureaucracy that is QHealth.
Fast forward 30+ years and a bucket load of experience later and I was back in the region but not Hocky itself. Again most pleasant colleagues but almost exclusively staffed by agency contract staff, retention-focussed, rapidly-promoted and wholly inexperienced who saw themselves as high-flyers and eenjuns. The culture is very risk-averse and the most straightforward things are subjected to multi-disciplinary review which, as often as not, makes recommendations based on what the paperwork says is best practice rather than what the patient would actually do in the real world. Now some patients and "cases" are very serious indeed and requite transfer to Hocky with all due haste. It's just bleedin' obvious. Small, rural places don't have the staff or facilities to manage high-risk cases. Would Hocky accept these cases? Noooooooooo, not without procedures or processes A, B & C. As a rule things got done and transfers effected with significant delay and multi-agency staff stress. 
So patient A ends up in Hocky and, as per protocol, daily contact with Hocky to gauge progress. Pick up the phone, ring the ward, "who? Are they a patient here?" or similar. "I've only just come on shift, the shift leader is in a meeting. I can't tell you anything about them cos I don't know them". And so on. Some of the staff with thicker accents might take a stab at giving you information but as often as not they were talking about the wrong patient. "Can you just read me the progress notes?" I ask. "There don't seem to be any" might be the reply or "I can't read the writing". "It's on the computer". "I don't have access to the computer". And on it goes. 
Hocky is a shotshow despite people' best efforts. So are some of the other regions. Discharge summaries just disappear into the ether and process says they should make their way to you, usually by fax, but do they? Nah.
Am I surprised that "Authorities have tried to contact 159 people vaccinated on July 21, after an “administration error” caused up to six of them to receive an “ultra-low dose” of the vaccine"? Not at all. Will they be able to work out who the 6 are? No chance. What will the remedy be to not repeat the error? That which causes the error in the first place - more and more over-complicated paperwork. 
I was meant to do job A, it's frontline and not at all sexy and as such is not popular but at the end of every day I had a stack of paperwork, Covid temperature and questionnaire. Computerised? Nah, Scan and fax to admin and in due course it might end up electronically in the right record. Designated admin staff working part-time, possibly just gone on leave or similar but the real time information isn't accurate. Might! I might see Fred in the morning and again in the afternoon or daily over several days. Temp check every time. "Have you been overseas since I last saw you?" every time.
Shotshow. With an I replacing an O. Needlessly so. But that's how you increase employment in the public sector.