Wesfarmers is a public company, said to have more than 107,000 employees in about 40 subsidiaries. And guess what? If you ever have any problems in dealing with any of it’s employees in any of it’s subsidiaries, there’s an ordinary email address you can use to seek help – it’s info@wesfarmers.com.au, which is prominently displayed on it’s website. We know, because, a few months ago, when we were having problems in dealing with the people in a New South Wales Officeworks store, (Officeworks is one of their subsidiaries,) we used it to seek help, and got a response within 2 or 3 hours from a person who was incredibly helpful, and, in no time at all, all our problems were sorted.
Why have we mentioned this? Because Wesfarmers illustrates the fact that modern technology makes it possible for even large organisations to be organised in this way – for people through the whole organisation to be accountable. In particular, NSW Health could be organised in this way.
There could be people who have the job of providing help to those dealing with anyone in the whole NSW Health organisation. (It would be interesting to know how many have this job in Wesfarmers? They obviously have enough to provide responses within 3 or 4 hours.) At present, of course, NSW Health is a million miles away from being like that.
We have written extensively about how, in 2015, a couple went to the Fairfield Government hospital for help in having a baby and got none, and the baby died. And how, in the more than five years since, we’ve worked on and off on (a) trying to find a government hospital whose people guarantee that couples going to them for helping having a baby would always get help, that they will never end up having to try to deliver the baby themselves, and (b) on trying to find out whether anything has changed at the Fairfield Government hospital? And we’ve had another go at the latter in the last couple of days, and, of course, got nowhere.
We’ve always said that we believe that the CEO of the hospital in 2015 should have gone to gaol, and that perhaps, if Paul Crowe, it’s present CEO, has done nothing to change things, perhaps he should go to gaol too. (Perhaps we’ll go to gaol for writing this stuff.) We sent an email to the hospital 6 days ago, and, after 4 days, having heard nothing, we sent a reminder 2 days ago, and eventually got an email yesterday from a “Paul,” presumably Paul Crowe, largely irrelevant and unintelligible, the first paragraph of which was this:-
So the emails we’ve sent over the years using our normal address have been going into their “junk” folder – typical Fairfield hospital and typical NSW Health stuff!
We have no idea what was meant by, “This website is also blocked from our NSW Health server.” Which website? What NSW Health server? But in any case, it’s blocked.
And we’ve been using an old Fairfield Hospital email address have we? How the hell were we supposed to know this? We went to the hospital’s website to get the latest email address and there wasn’t one, so we used one we’d used in the past.
Incidentally, as far as up-to-date email addresses for the people in NSW Health are concerned, we sent an email to Natasha Maclaren-Jones, the Parliamentary Secretary for Health, yesterday, reminding her that we had sent the following to her in an email on 19 Jun. 2021, to which she hadn’t responded, and asking her if there was yet a list that was less than 22 years old?
We’ll let you know if we get a response this time.
If you Google Fairfield Government hospital you are also given access to 131 Google reviews of the hospital, in nearly half of which 1 star out out of 5 is given when you can’t give 0 out of 5 – and if you read many of them, you almost can’t stop crying. Clearly Paul Crowe doesn’t care. But to us, the real concern is that those in the top levels of the NSW Government don’t care that Paul Crowe doesn’t care.
Over the years we’ve tried to raise so many issues with Premier Berejiklian, but our emails aren’t even acknowledged. Perhaps our emails have just gone into a “trash” folder too. They may as well have!