Editor’s view: Taxpayers want money redirected to front line

As confidence in Queensland Health drops, Minister Shannon Fentiman needs to make it a priority to examine where taxpayer money is actually going in her department, writes the editor.

A survey revealing fewer than one in five Queenslanders have confidence in the state-run health sector should be deeply unsettling news for the ruling state Labor government.

The Courier-Mail’s sentiment survey involving more than 6800 people across the state has revealed more than 72 per cent of Queenslanders have lost confidence in the health system.

The results show just 16 per cent of those surveyed professed confidence in the health sector, while a further 12 per cent were “unsure”.

The results are worrying in themselves, yet more so when viewed across the span of the past three years.

In the previous survey, carried out in 2020 just as the pandemic was kicking in, more than half the Queenslanders questioned had faith in Queensland Health.

Queenslanders, and indeed most Australians, have been justly proud of the nation’s health system ever since the early 1970s when the Whitlam government’s then social security minister Bill Hayden devised Australia’s first universal healthcare program in the form of Medicare.

Health Minister Shannon Fentiman. Picture: Richard Walker

While overseas models of health care, particularly in the US, can leave people financially vulnerable, Australia has demonstrated a collective determination to provide a far more egalitarian model of care.

States and territories which share the burden with the commonwealth are responsible for a wide range of health issues including managing and administering private hospitals as well as ambulance services, and all have played their part with varying degrees of success.

Yet it’s the taxpayer who always meets the bills.

Health expenditure in the 2022-23 commonwealth budget reached just under $106bn and represented nearly 17 per cent of total expenditure, while the annual Queensland health budget reaches beyond $25bn.

Yet Australian Medical Association Queensland president Dr Maria Boulton concedes in today’s story that it is a “concern but no surprise” that Queenslanders are losing faith in their health department.

We now have ambulance ramping at record levels, GPs closing down because Medicare rebates won’t keep up with rising input costs, regional maternity wards have been on bypass, and increasingly crowded emergency departments where people can wait hours for attention.

One of the state government’s so-called solutions has been satellite hospitals – which have proved controversial, with even GPs unsure what their purpose is.

They should never have been called “hospitals” in the first place.

One of the few positives of our healthcare system is the dedication of our medical professionals and healthcare workers who often work extraordinary hours, with many appearing to view their job more as a vocation than a career.

This survey demonstrates that Queensland Health Minister Shannon Fentiman has perhaps the most challenging job in the Queensland government in the year ahead.

Queenslanders do their job in providing the funds to maintain our humane and, from a global perspective, well-resourced health system.

But they will not tolerate a system that cannot dispatch an ambulance in time to save a patient’s life, nor one that can’t provide adequate maternity wards in regional centres.

It may be that Ms Fentiman will have to make it a priority in 2024 to closely examine where all the money is going.

Any wastage inside an ever-expanding health bureaucracy, for example, should be swiftly identified, and the money redirected to the front line.