Shadow Minister for Health Leanne Castley has called out the Health Minister for telling Canberrans Canberra Health Services’ staff surveys showed ‘a significant improvement in culture year on year’ and that a December survey had returned DHS’ best ever results on workplace culture, despite the results being statistically invalid due to a low response rate from frontline health workers.

The Minister’s comments echoed claims by Canberra Health Services (CHS) earlier in the week that the December staff survey showed CHS had the ‘best culture at this point in time in the last eight years’.

Ms Castley said this particular survey only tested employees’ engagement or satisfaction with CHS, not key elements of CHS’ workplace culture which is planned to be conducted next month.

“Only 35 per cent of CHS staff responded to the survey,” Ms Castley said.

"An internal memo sent by CHS' communications team a week efore the survey closed stated CHS needed to reach a 40 per cent response rate for the results to be 'statistically valid.

“The company that ran the survey, even stated in their report that that data from any response rate below 40% should be ‘used with caution’.”

Ms Castley also pointed to the fact that CHS divisions with an interest in a positive result had high response rates, as opposed to frontline hospital employees, meaning the results are skewed.

“When you breakdown respondents by division you see that Strategy, Policy, Planning and People and Culture divisions of CHS had among the highest response rates with 83 per cent and 81 per cent,” Ms Castley said.

"The lowest response rates were from the division of Nursing and Midwifery Patient Support (23%) and the Division of Surgery (24%) with only 248 out of 1,017 employees responding.

“If the Minister wants to claim this survey is ‘valid’ she should equally quote its findings that only 23 per cent of senior and executive managers directly reporting to the CEO had high trust in their executive management team and that this was very low compared with like hospitals.

“The response rate for this particular staff survey has declined since 2019 when CHS received a 52 per cent response rate well above the 35 per cent from the December 2021 survey.

“The Minister wants to pretend that the culture is improving, but the fact is more staff are becoming disengaged than ever before. If the Minister wants new staff to stay, she must make real improvements to CHS’ culture, as stakeholders have suggested.

“The Health Minister should stop focusing on rebranding and spin, and seriously address the significant cultural issues afflicting Canberra’s public health system,” Ms Castley said concluded.