[FairmontGS]

Well Pravda The Age has certainly turned against its former ALP masters...

Former AMA president takes aim at Andrews government, calls for COVID royal commission

Outgoing Australian Medical Association Victoria president Julian Rait has called for a royal commission into the nation's response to the pandemic and taken aim at the Victorian government's culture of defensiveness.

Professor Rait - who previously likened the state government's response to the pandemic to "watching a slow car crash" - said the key reason for a royal commission was for governments to learn from past mistakes.

"In life, unless you're prepared to acknowledge mistakes you won't grow and that's my concern about some of our institutions, particularly the Victorian government where there is this long-standing culture of defensiveness," he said.

In an exit interview with The Sunday Age, Professor Rait, who stepped down last month, said he believes the almost 3000 healthcare worker COVID-19 infections reported last year were avoidable and caused by an abject failure of health authorities to accept the threat of airborne transmission.

The crisis was further fuelled by a dire shortage of highly protective gear such as N95 masks, he said.

Professor Rait - who previously likened the state government's response to the pandemic to "watching a slow car crash" - said the key reason for a royal commission was for governments to learn from past mistakes.

"In life, unless you're prepared to acknowledge mistakes you won't grow and that's my concern about some of our institutions, particularly the Victorian government where there is this long-standing culture of defensiveness," he said.

"Governments want to be able to spin, deflect or obfuscate because that avoids having to deal with the difficult questions and also the hard investment decisions that would arise as a consequence of an inquiry. But unless we do this we are going to be prone to making the same mistakes all over again in the next pandemic."

Professor Rait believes dedicated coronavirus hospitals will be needed in the future to free up the state's healthcare system and stop inevitable outbreaks of the more highly infectious variants of COVID-19 that were emerging.

"It is a obviously a contentious issue," said Professor Rait, who led the Victorian branch of the influential doctors' group for three years, serving an extra year in the role owing to the coronavirus outbreak. "But you're probably going to have to have a purpose-built facility to really do it properly."

His daughter, Louise, was a medical intern at the Royal Melbourne Hospital last year when it became the centre of the nation's largest institutional coronavirus outbreak among healthcare workers. More than 260 staff caught coronavirus between July 1 and August 31.

"I felt responsibility to do everything I could to protect healthcare workers," Professor Rait said. "But as a father with a daughter working on the frontline the anxiety was palpable."

At the height of Melbourne's deadly second wave of coronavirus, and in the midst of a punishing 112-day lockdown, Professor Rait said he barely slept. His phone did not stop ringing.

The ophthalmologist was working late into the night as the Victorian head of the Australian Medical Association, before spending hours reading the endless flow of scientific literature emerging on the then mysterious virus.

Each day brought news of more COVID-19 outbreaks. Victoria's contact tracing system was collapsing. Testing systems were overwhelmed. Healthcare workers were being infected in their thousands, and some were so sick they were in intensive care wards fighting for their lives.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/melbo...edgdhp&pc=U531