Kate Kyriacou: How can police stop youth crime if they are tied up at hospitals?

Youth crime and our health system are two of Queensland’s biggest issues – yet we can’t seem to get either right.

At a time when Queenslanders are questioning how safe they feel in their own homes, it is certainly not helping anyone that overworked police are waiting hours in hospital emergency departments and ramped alongside ambulances to offload patients.

This is the flow-on effect of a system stressed to breaking point, where frustrated and exhausted hospital staff are telling police with mental health patients to leave as they look over a waiting room, over hallways filled to the brim with people needing help.

It’s a system where police cars and ambulances wait alongside each other in hospital car parks, both needed elsewhere, but there they stay until the elusive free hospital bed appears.

The Brisbane Region Interagency Development Register was not supposed to have been made public - but was released after a months-long Right to Information request.

Ambulances ramped at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. Picture: Josh Woning

It’s an incomplete record of about three years of instances where police were held up at hospitals, on the side of the road, doing security duties, or patient transfers - anything but patrolling the streets and being available for the next call.

How will police respond to youths in stolen cars, to kids committing burglaries or brandishing knives when they are sitting in hospital waiting rooms?

This is the merry-go-round resulting from overcrowded hospitals.

No hospital beds means ambulances parked for hours in hospital car parks.

It means no ambulances available when police need them.

And it means police driving people to hospitals to park alongside paramedics, or performing security duties over their charges until they can be admitted.

Meanwhile, Queenslanders keep their car keys by the front door, hoping that if a young criminal picks their house to enter, and their car to steal, they will take it without trouble and go.