A senior staff member in ACT Health was bullied to the brink of suicide last year because of budget pressures within the public health system, the ACT Opposition has alleged.
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Canberra Liberals health spokeswoman Vicki Dunne has been pushing for a board of inquiry into allegations of systemic bullying and harassment in the ACT's health system.
On Wednesday, she spoke in parliament about a former ACT Health staffer who rang her office recently nearly a year after he'd tried to take his own life.
Giving the former staffer the pseudonym Charlie, she said he had worked his way into a leadership role after many years in the organisation, but suffered relentless bullying which eventually forced him out of the health system.
“A concerning element of his bullying and intimidation seems to have been budget driven. It is well known two main budget cost areas in organisations are wages and accommodation costs and the easiest path to achieving budget cuts is to cut staffing costs," Mrs Dunne said.
"We all know there are legitimate means of doing that through redundancies and restructures but that approach only takes you to a certain point. Once the redundancy budget is reached it becomes necessary to find other means and there have been a couple of ways that have been identified for doing that.
"One is to try and discredit your staff, you look for enough dirt on them , you try and performance review them and you push them out through performance review or alternately there is bullying and intimidation which continues to the point they can’t stand it any longer and they quit. Charlie actually experienced both and from a number of quarters."
Mrs Dunne said Charlie finally quit after management sprung a performance review on him, without giving him the chance to prepare or have a support person present.
"Charlie was invited to a meeting with a senior executive, no reason was given. When he turned up he was faced with a confronting performance review by not only one but two senior officials in ACT Health. No warning was given to Charlie, he was afforded no natural justice," Mrs Dunne said.
Since then, Charlie has struggled to find work and almost lost his house due to the financial pressure.
"His kids aged under 10 have offered him the contents of their piggy bank to help him," Mrs Dunne said.
Mrs Dunne said her office had been in contact regularly with Charlie since that phone call, and he now had a casual job and was on the road to recovery.
She said his story was the "most disturbing" she had heard from people in the ACT health system, but he was far from alone.
Her office had heard from ACT Health staff who'd been denied access to their preferred shifts, whose leave requests were processed last and who were openly and repeatedly criticised in front of their peers.
She said people who had reported issues to management had found themselves accused of bullying instead of being helped.
However Labor and the Greens voted down the Liberals' motion to establish a board of inquiry into the allegations.
Health Minister Meegan Fitzharris was on her way to Alice Springs for COAG, but Mental Health Minister Shane Rattenbury said there was already work being done to improve the culture of the organisation.
"These are very serious and concerning stories that are obviously very distressing to listen to. The staff culture of an organisation with more than 7000 people is not something that can change overnight," Mr Rattenbury said.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr said the cost of holding the territory's equivalent of a royal commission would be in the tens of millions of dollars and he would prefer that money to be spent on frontline hospital services.
"Clearly that is the choice before us," Mr Barr said.
Crisis support can be found at Lifeline: (13 11 14 and lifeline.org.au), the Suicide Call Back Service (1300 659 467 and suicidecallbackservice.org.au) and beyondblue (1300 22 4636 and beyondblue.org.au)
