Disastrous NSW ambulance management

After a distinguished 30-year career, which included bringing Kerry Packer back to life, Bill Taylor quit the NSW Ambulance Service in 2006, fed up with an entrenched culture of bullying and discrimination. He personally knew five officers who committed suicide and one who attempted suicide, and he had the grim task of arranging funerals for others.

Last week, as a NSW parliamentary inquiry into the strife-torn service got under way, Mr Taylor said of his fallen colleagues: "They see no other way out because of the lack of support by the persons appointed by the service who are supposed to look after its members. "I used to organise the funerals for officers who died in Sydney either from suicide or accidents. [The Ambulance Service] would make a show of caring by paying for the funeral and getting the band to play but then it's swept under the carpet."

The upper house inquiry, chaired by Liberal MLC Robyn Parker, has received more than 100 submissions from officers alleging bullying and harassment within the service. Some, citing victimisation by colleagues, have linked their personal mistreatment to forced stress leave, resignations, clinical depression and, in several cases, suicide attempts of their own. Almost without exception, the officers insist their complaints, warnings or cries for help fell on deaf ears or were swept under the carpet by senior management. "The majority are about terrible bullying and harassment that has gone on for years and is driving people to do terrible things. Their psychological health is damaged. For some their whole lives are damaged," Ms Parker said.

The inquiry heard Christine Hodder, 38, endured years of torment at her station in Cowra before she hanged herself in 2005. Her former supervisor, Phil Roxburgh, has accused management of being "grossly negligent and dismissive" of her plight, while the service's professional standards unit found no one accountable for her death. The Sun-Herald has learned that the officer sent to Cowra to replace Ms Hodder also complained of being bullied after he revealed the two had been high school mates in the state's north. He left work on stress leave in August, 2006 and remains on leave. Chris Pollard, the senior Newcastle officer posted to Cowra as Mr Roxburgh's replacement in January, 2006, lasted several months before he too moved on, allegedly after being subjected to intimidation.

Mr Taylor - who used a defibrillator to revive Mr Packer after he suffered a heart attack at a polo match in 1990 - made a submission to the inquiry. He said he was bullied from his first day of training at a station, with the older officers telling him, "We don't like you. We're going to fail you." The final straw was the incompetence and bullying by a male officer at Tanilba Bay, which contributed to two officers taking stress leave. "I would take sickies so I didn't have to work with him and then I decided I had to retire," Mr Taylor said.

The Health Services Union has backed the claims, pointing to widespread disaffection with the Ambulance Service's internal investigations, many of which it says are "prejudicial in nature, inconsistent in application and protracted in duration". It has also called for a comprehensive plan to make sure all ambulance workplaces are free of persecution.

At an openly hostile statewide meeting last September, 500 officers had expressed "absolutely no confidence" in senior management "and in particular, the current chief executive", union chief Michael Williamson said. Testifying before the inquiry, NSW Ambulance Service chief executive Greg Rochford acknowledged there had been strong criticism of the service's ability to resolve disputes and address workplace behaviour issues. He said much was being done to simplify and speed up procedures and improve interaction between managers and front-line staff.

NSW Director-General of Health Deborah Picone said the service had a zero-tolerance policy on bullying and harassment. More than 400 managers were expected to be retrained in its implementation by the end of next year and a taskforce had been set up.

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Patients to grow spare body parts

HEART disease patients could grow "spare body parts" with a radical technique being developed by Melbourne engineers. Swinburne University scientists are poised to put on trial world-first technology that may see entire organs cultivated from just a few human cells. First on the agenda are heart valves that Prof Yosry Morsi believes his team can grow - and have transplanted into humans - within five years. The breakthrough may help up to 6000 Australians a year, revolutionising the surgery that repaired Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's heart about 15 years ago.

Prof Morsi said he believed that the technique might make artificial valves and "tissue" versions from humans, pigs and cows redundant. "We are trying to copy nature," he said. "We'd be using a patient's own cells, so their body is not going to react it."

The key to the technique, which could be tested on animals within a year, is "scaffolding" modelled on a patient's real heart. A cell from the patient's heart is put into the scaffolding, which is left in a machine that simulates human heart conditions. Cells multiply, growing into a replica of the original within 12 weeks. "While we are creating this living tissue, we are subjecting it to exactly the sort of pressures it will be under (in the body), like the pressure of blood flow," Prof Morsi said.

Though other scientists around the world are also in the race to successfully "grow" human organs, it is Swinburne's techniques that put it on track for the big breakthrough.

Prof Frank Rosenfeldt, head of The Alfred's cardiac surgical research unit, said Prof Morsi's work could revolutionise the common but complicated operation. "If a human heart valve can be grown using the patient's tissues, this would be a great advantage," he said. "It would be a living tissue, which might even regenerate and repair itself."

Like Mr Rudd, Melbourne grandfather Bill Wade was given a tissue valve and is enjoying a new lease on life. He was transplanted with a pig's valve - Mr Rudd had a human donor - at The Alfred in February. "I'm happy with this, and they've said it will last 10 to 15 years before I need a replacement, maybe longer," said Mr Wade, from Sandringham. "But if I had the choice (to grow) my own valve, that would just be amazing."

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Safety warnings a new chapter for fairytales

TEACHERS are being urged to give children safety messages after reading them fairytales warning not to copy characters such as Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and Hansel and Gretel. A new child protection curriculum being implemented by the Education Department also requires teachers to refer to children's "sexual parts" and use their correct anatomical names with children as young as three.

Child development experts have backed the measures, but critics believe they are an example of political correctness overkill that could turn children into "little nervous wrecks".

Parents across SA are being briefed on the impact of the new curriculum, which aims to teach children from preschool upwards the early warning signs of being unsafe and recognising abuse.

Teachers have been trained to be wary of storybooks in which characters put themselves at risk - and to respond by offering safety messages. For example, children would be warned not to talk to people they don't know as Little Red Riding Hood did with the Big Bad Wolf; not to walk around unsupervised like Goldilocks; and not to enter unknown houses like Hansel and Gretel. Popular modern books would also face scrutiny. The picture book Pig in the Pond, in which a farmer strips off to have a swim on a hot day, would be followed by explaining that it would be inappropriate to undress in front of someone you did not know.

Emeritus Professor of Child Development at UniSA, Professor Freda Briggs, who was consulted in the curriculum's development, supported the measures, calling for them to be implemented nationally. "This is about appropriately empowering the child," she said. "Kids are talking about sex at age five now. It's so in-your-face, I'm afraid that innocence is gone. They are sexualised younger and younger. "We need to use correct body terms because by giving children silly names or names that only the family understands, you're telling your child that you can't cope with talking about it. How does a child get help if nobody understands?"

But Australian Family Association spokesman Jerome Appleby said the measures - the first update to the child safety curriculum in more than 20 years - encroached on the domain of parents. Putting safety messages on fairytales risked frightening children unnecessarily. "You don't want to scare children too much and create an environment of fear," he said. "We don't want to create little nervous wrecks. "Parents are best placed to determine how much they need to tell their children and at what age."

Mr Appleby said teaching young children about the correct names for their "sexual parts" would contribute to the early sexualisation of children. "This will destroy the innocence of children too early," he said. "I don't think it's appropriate for very young children. They aren't ready for those sorts of adult concepts and it's a sad indictment on society."

Social commentator David Chalke said drawing modern morals from fairytales was fine, if stories or characters were not altered. "A lot of nursery tales are cautionary tales in their original sense, so I don't see a problem with making it relevant to today," he said. But Mr Chalke said it was "political correctness overkill" to introduce pre-schoolers to sexual concepts. "This is bureaucratic meddling; it's absurdity and it smacks of overkill," he said.

"To me, this is education bureaucracy getting above itself. "The heavy hand of the state is impinging on the parent-child relationship. They are saying that you must be correctly programmed from the age of three. We're talking about children who can neither read nor write. Leave the pre-schoolers alone."

Federation of Catholic School Parent Communities spokeswoman Ann Bliss said it was positive for pre-school teachers to incorporate safety messages into fairytales. "It's a good compromise. We're not throwing the fairytales out but we're engaging in conversations with our children, keeping them safe," she said.

In an emailed response, an Education Department spokesperson said: "There's no easy way to deliver a message about such a sensitive topic, and that is why the State Government enlisted the advice and assistance of local child protection experts in developing the program. The curriculum is taught in a way that is relevant and appropriate for each year level, and includes the use of anatomically correct and respectful language."

The Keeping Safe program was developed in conjunction with SA Police, Family and Community Services, the Australian Education Union, the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect.


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Mathematics teaching dumbed down

STUDENTS are being taught maths at the most superficial level by teachers rushing to pass on the basic skills while shying away from complex ideas. In yet another example of children being failed by national school curriculums, a special report for the state leaders finds maths teaching is failing students by setting the bar too low.

The National Numeracy Review report, released to The Weekend Australian, criticises the national benchmarks in maths, which assess students against minimum standards rather than requiring a desirable proficiency. "The implication (is) that minimum standards are good enough, at least for some students," says the report on numeracy commissioned by the Council of Australian Governments. "All students and their families, however, have a right to expect high-quality - not minimum - numeracy outcomes from their schooling."

The review committee, chaired by the former head of the NSW Board of Studies Gordon Stanley, says the time spent teaching maths in classrooms has decreased over the past decade, yet students are expected to learn about a greater number of mathematical concepts. "Curriculum emphases and assessment regimes should be explicitly designed to discourage a reliance upon superficial and low-level proficiency," the report says. It recommends phasing out the streaming of students according to their ability, citing research that says it has little effect on achievement. "It does produce gains in attainment for higher-achieving students at the expense of lower-attaining students," it says.

The report recommends that all teachers, regardless of their intended speciality, be trained as numeracy teachers and maths be taught across all subjects. The report says primary school students should spend five hours a week and high school students four hours a week on maths and numeracy, including time spent learning maths in other subjects. The report also suggests introducing specialist maths teachers to work shoulder-to-shoulder with other teachers, particularly those without specialist training in maths teaching. It says students from the early years of school should be given complex maths problems and the language of maths should be explicitly taught.

The review was commissioned by the human capital working group of COAG to review international research about teaching maths and advise ways in which teaching standards could be improved. The report says literacy has received enormous attention and resources in recent years but numeracy provides a bigger challenge for schools. It uses the term numeracy, as opposed to maths, to describe the mathematical understanding required in today's workplace, defining numeracy as the capacity to bridge the gap between maths and the real world. "The mathematical knowledge, skill and understanding people need today, if they are to be truly numerate, involves considerably more than the acquisition of mathematical routines and algorithms," it says.

The report cites research that says Australia suffers from a "shallow teaching syndrome". Compared with other high-achieving countries in international maths tests, Australian schoolrooms have the highest percentage of repetitive problems and the highest percentage of problems of low complexity.

While the new national numeracy tests introduced this year will assess students against levels of proficiency, previously students were only judged against a benchmark set at the minimum level of knowledge required to progress through school. "They do not describe proficiency in numeracy or even the minimum standards that the community expects from Australian schools," it says.

The low standards expected of students are compounded by remedial programs targeting students failing to meet those minimum standards rather than aiming to assist all students to acquire some proficiency. "The rush to apparent proficiency at the expense of the sound conceptual development needed for sustained and ongoing mathematical proficiency must be rejected," it says. "From the earliest years, greater emphasis (should) be given to providing students with frequent exposure to higher-level mathematical problems rather than routine procedural tasks, in contexts of relevance to them."

Part of the problem facing schools is trying to teach more maths in less time, with some evidence suggesting the class time spent on maths has diminished over the years. One study estimates a Year 4 student in Australia spends about 250 minutes a week and a Year 8 student 210 minutes a week on maths. The report recommends primary school students spend 300 minutes a week and high school students 280 minutes a week on maths.

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