WorkSafe charges Victorian Health Department over hotel quarantine program

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Victoria’s Health Department has been charged over last year’s mistakes in hotel quarantine that drove the state’s deadly second wave of COVID-19.

WorkSafe has charged the Department of Health with 58 breaches of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, alleging the department failed to provide a safe workplace for its employees and failed to ensure people were not exposed to risks to their health and safety.

Hotel workers inside the Stamford Plaza, one of the quarantine hotels that became the site of an outbreak last year.Credit: Getty Images

Set up to prevent COVID-19 from transmitting from overseas arrivals into the community, the department’s hotel quarantine program last year did the opposite, with an inquiry into the failed system linking 783 deaths during the state’s second wave back to the hotels.

In a statement published on Wednesday, WorkSafe alleged the department failed to appoint people with infection prevention and control expertise at the hotels, failed to provide security guards with appropriate infection control training and did not provide, at least initially, written instructions on how to use protective gear.

The department also did not update written instructions about how to wear masks at several of the hotels, WorkSafe said.

In all charges, the health and safety regulator said the department’s own employees, the government’s authorised officers and security guards were put at risk of contracting COVID-19 and serious illness or death.

The maximum penalty for each of the charges is $1.64 million, or $95.12 million in total.

According to the regulator’s statement, 17 of the charges are breaches under Section 21 of the act, failing to provide and maintain, as far as reasonably practicable, a working environment that was safe and without risks to health for its employees.

The other 41 alleged offences are breaches under section 23 of the same act of failing to ensure, as far as was reasonably practicable, that people who weren’t employees – for example, contracted security guards – were not exposed to risks to their health and safety arising from conduct of its undertaking.

The charges will go to court for a filing hearing at the Magistrates Court on October 22.

More to come.

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