Dr Kathleen Dermody
Committee Secretary
Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600 Facsimile 02 6277 5818
Dear Dr Dermody,
I seek leave to appear before the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade in order to express my concerns about the critically weakened state of the Australian Defence Force.
I am a Medical Officer in the Army Reserve, and have a natural and reasonable interest in health support to the ADF. My concerns revolve around the inability of the ADF to provide health support to its forces. Broadly speaking, I am extremely worried that:
- The ADF is no longer able to conduct independent operations;
- Australia is no longer able to fulfill its treaty obligations;
- Deployed Australian forces are not supported by appropriate health services;
- ADF health personnel are losing experience and expertise because they are not being exposed to health operations in support of deployed forces;
- Existing ADF health personnel are demoralised by their continued neglect;
- There is a toxic culture amongst ADF General Service Officers of denigration and discrimination towards doctors, nurses, dentists, and other health specialists which drives them to resign their commissions after only short periods of service; and
- This damaging attitude of GSOs towards health specialists has made recruitment of Specialist Service Officers extremely difficult, despite priority recruiting campaigns aimed specifically at health professionals.
I feel obliged to elevate these matters to the level of Senate Committee because my concerns have not been addressed by any of the following ADF personnel or agencies despite several years of formal applications:
- My Officer Commanding 6th Health Company, Major Kaylene Baird;
- Former and current Commanding Officers of the 4th Combat Service Support Battalion, Lieutenant Colonels Michael Pollock and Laureen Grimes;
- The former Brigade Commander of 4th Brigade, Brigadier Michael Arnold;
- The Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Ken Gillespie;
- The Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston; and
- The Inspector General of the ADF, Mr Geoff Earley AM.
I am convinced that these are genuine, critical problems which merit attention at the level of the Committee.
Background
I am a serving Medical Officer in the Army Reserve. I originally enlisted as a Private in 1980 in the Army Reserve, and transferred to the Regular Army in 1981. I discharged in 1985 to finish high school and attend university. I obtained a Bachelor of Pharmacy in 1988, a Graduate Diploma in Applied Science in 1992 and my Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery in 2000. I accepted a commission as a Medical Officer with the rank of captain in 2005. I have been posted to the 4th Combat Service Support Battalion in Melbourne since then, except for a 4 month deployment to East Timor at the end of 2006 with the ANZAC Battle Group where I was the aeromedical evacuation doctor.
I have been increasingly dismayed at the contempt displayed towards and the poor treatment of Specialist Service Officers such as doctors, dentists and nurses by General Service Officers of the Australian Army. I have been forced to conclude that this is a common attitude amongst the GSO officers, instilled at the Royal Military College, Duntroon and fostered in other training centres such as the Army Logistic Training Centre at Bandiana. My personal experience at these training institutions is that health support specialists are barely tolerated and often denigrated. I believe this attitude towards health support specialists is widespread, condoned by middle and high ranking officers and is responsible for driving doctors, nurses and dentists out of the ADF, so much so that the Australian Army now has a crisis in which it simply does not have enough of these critical individual assets to provide care for deployed or garrisoned forces. These specialists are recruited, but the ADF is not able to retain them because they are treated with contempt verging on ridicule by their GSO colleagues.
Furthermore, most of the doctors in the Regular Army are junior, inexperienced doctors. These junior doctors are just out of internship and are fulfilling their Return of Service obligations for support lent to them by the ADF during their studies. These doctors do not have the experience necessary to support operations.
The proof of the severity of this crisis is that the ADF is no longer able to provide medical support for any of our deployed forces, and struggles to provide medical support to troops in Australia.
This inability to provide health support may also be the principal or even the only reason Australia was not able to take over as the lead country of the NATO coalition in Oruzgan province on the first of August 2010, despite the ADF's dramatic reduction in operational commitments in Iraq. Australia is not able to honour its commitments to its allies.
As the Committee is aware, medical support is provided by ASPEN Medical Services in East Timor and the Solomon Island. While this support is helpful, it is not appropriate for Australian forces deployed on operations. The fundamental difference between service and civilian medical personnel is that members of the ADF have been trained and equipped to defend themselves and their patients(s), and can be reasonably be sent into a combat environment. Civilian health contractors are not able to provide this support. The end result of this is that Australian troops are now in positions in which they may be injured and appropriate medical care may not be provided for them.
Civilian medical services are extremely expensive. I estimate the cost to be ten to twenty times more expensive than equivalent uniformed health services. The differences arise from rates of pay and hours of work. A uniformed health provider expects to be meagerly paid, work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and to live and work with his or her assigned formation. Civilian health providers are paid up to thousands of dollars a day, work shifts and live in hotels.
I believe this crisis in health support is well known amongst senior officers of the ADF, but this toxic culture is so entrenched that it is not possible for change to occur with many of them. These officers regularly commit the ultimate act of neglect of their troops, sending Australian men and women into combat and peace-keeping operations without appropriate health support and further degrading the scant extant health capabilities of the ADF.
Furthermore, those health assets the ADF currently does retain become more demoralised and further deskilled while they are neglected by these officers.
My concerns have been met with increasing hostility since 2007, and I have been inappropriately referred to a psychologist and charged with insubordination more than a dozen times in the past two years. None of the officers or the IGADF has responded to my written, specific concerns about the inability of the ADF to provide health support to Australian troops. They have all made rather feeble, clumsy attempts to deflect attention back onto me and to place pressure on me to stop pursuing solutions to these problems, ignoring their responsibilities and directives and literally questioning if I am fit for continued service because of my reasonable interest in the provision of health support.
There are no further avenues through which I can help the ADF address their worsening crisis in health support.
In conclusion, the ADF is not capable of providing health support to deployed or even garrisoned Australian forces. As an ADF officer who has exhausted the chain of command, I am obliged to bring these serious matters of national security before the Committee. As a Medical Officer, I am able to provide the Committee with some detail and directly relevant personal experiences.
I seek leave to appear to properly inform the Committee of these matters and answer any questions arising from this application.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Julian Fidge
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