Editor’s View: Clear sign Yvette D’Ath’s days are numbered

Queensland’s health bureaucracy runs an excuses factory so big it’s become our largest manufacturing industry, writes the editor.

Yesterday we saw the first clear signal that Yvette D’Ath’s days as the state’s health minister are surely almost over. Acting Premier Steven Miles’s welcome decision to personally intervene in the central Queensland hospital crisis was an embarrassment for Ms D’Ath and the health bureaucracy.

The revelation in the Sunday Mail that healthy expectant mums from Gladstone are now so fearful of travelling to Rockhampton while in labour (and risking a roadside birth) that they are demanding elective C-sections instead so they can be sure of receiving proper healthcare was a turning point in this sorry saga. Remember, this is Queensland’s 11th-most populated city, a place that about 50,000 call home and where two or three babies are normally born every day. It is indeed now a national disgrace.

Health Minister Yvette D'Ath. Picture: Richard Walker

Remember also that this is not a crisis that has only just emerged. It was all the way back in July that the Gladstone maternity bypass was declared; three months later that a Gladstone mum indeed gave birth on the side of the Bruce Highway, on the way to Rocky. And it has now also been three months since local Labor state MP Glenn Butcher pledged to quit if maternity services were not returned to Gladstone.

But this is not Mr Butcher’s fault. This is the fault of Queensland Health – and the Health Minister, someone who time and again has shown disregard for the health of Queenslanders; preferring instead to simply deny the existence of obvious problems, to repeat on loop misleading political statements, and to refuse to stand up to a health bureaucracy that now runs an excuses factory so big it’s become our largest manufacturing industry.

The real shame in all of this is that our frontline health staff continue to be the most amazing example of what is the best in all of us. They selflessly care for others every single day. They deserve our thanks and our endless support.

MP Glenn Butcher. Picture: NCA NewsWire / John Gass

But these frontline staff are being let down by the fact there are now literally thousands of well-paid staffers who never get near a ward, but instead soak up their share of a mountain of taxpayer-funded waste that shamelessly hides behind the proud title of “Queensland Health”.

An example of this was found in a small item in our George Street Beat column last Friday. It revealed the fact that the Metro South Hospital and Health Service is recruiting a new “executive director of media and communications” to oversee a team of 20 (yes, 20!) communications professionals. That is, just one of the state’s 15 hospital and health services not only has a communications team bigger than most real newsrooms, but it pays $250,000 a year to the person who runs that team – tasked with doing “media relations, web media, social media, branding and marketing, publications and events management”. And so while Metro South plans “events”, in Gladstone pregnant women can’t even be sure a doctor will be on hand locally when it comes time to give birth.

Acting Premier Miles deserves credit for deciding yesterday that enough is enough and telling his underperforming Health Minister that he would meet with her and her director-general at 3pm to determine what could be done to fix the problems in Gladstone. Why that intervention has taken six months is a fair question, but the more important one is when Ms D’Ath will be punted from Health.