Gleeso: Ramp up efforts to fix crisis or pay the price
The Palaszczuk Government has had seven years to fix Queensland’s hospital and ambulance system – and there will be nobody left to blame if Anthony Albanese becomes PM, writes Peter Gleeson.
Peter Gleeson
Don't miss out on the headlines from Peter Gleeson. Followed categories will be added to My News.
QUEENSLAND voters may turn a blind eye to integrity and youth justice issues but politicians ignore health provision and challenges around hospitals and ambulances at their peril.
The Palaszczuk Government has had seven years to get Queensland’s hospital and ambulance system right and it has spectacularly failed.
It will lose the next election – still 30 months away – unless it fixes the problem with ramping and ambulance delays.
If Anthony Albanese becomes Prime Minister, and that’s no sure thing after being exposed as a bumbling fool, the Palaszczuk Government will have nobody to blame for its health woes.
The recent ramping crisis exposes a much deeper malaise within Queensland Health.
As regular readers know, I believe Queensland Health is the most poorly run bureaucracy in Australia.
It has been like that throughout the Palaszczuk years, a secretive, obsessive, paranoid organisation that punishes enterprise and rewards mediocrity.
It has terrible morale as hardworking doctors and nurses put up with a Kremlin-like attitude to the workplace.
The ramping crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. Exhausted paramedics are sleeping at stations and being stood down because of fatigue.
Hospital ramping – where patients wait more than half an hour in an ambulance to get admitted – is at crisis levels, with one in two people unable to be treated.
It means long ambulance wait times for the sick, sometimes four or five hours. Patients are dying while waiting. The figures in Queensland are worse than South Australia, where new Labor premier Peter Malinauskassuccessfully campaigned on cutting ambulance ramping to win the recent election.
Official figures show Queensland paramedics lost an extraordinary number of hours stuck on ramps last year.
A parliamentary Question on Notice revealed our ambos lost more than 13,000 hours in March and May last year, and at other times of the year it routinely exceeded 10,000 hours.
The AMA’s Queensland branch says the situation is dire. It’s a crisis, they say.
Worse, the Palaszczuk Government did a review into the public hospital system, and rather than own the problem, as usual, blamed the Morrison Government.
AMAQ vice-president Dr Bav Manoharan says: “There were 40 recommendations in that report and only four of them were to be actioned by the Queensland government, 36 for the federal government. So it’s a little bit interesting with the timing with the federal election.
“When AMA Queensland engaged in this inquiry and we gave evidence as part of it, we really thought it was an opportunity for us to really consider what Queenslanders needed for their health care system and an opportunity to perhaps look at real ways to fix all the issues.
“I mean, hospital ramping, surgical wait lists, and all of these have been issues for such a long time.’’
Last week we saw the extraordinary situation where a gravely ill woman, waiting for an ambulance, told her husband to sue the State Government if she died.
The Opposition has received a flood of emails from people outlining their frustration at being unable to get an ambulance to their home, or waiting hours.
I got this email: “My brother who lives at Mt. Ommaney and has Parkinson’s fell yesterday morning and broke his hip.
“His wife rang for an ambulance at 7.00am and following a further three phone calls an ambulance finally arrived at 2.30am.
“He was operated on last night and thanks to the staff at the Wesley Hospital so far he is doing OK. In this day and age to have to wait that long is a disgrace.
“The Queensland Government blow their trumpet regarding how much they have spent on health. I wonder how much of the spending has gone to the frontline rather than propping up the administration and Fat Cats in the Public Service.’’
Telstra last week took the unprecedented move of having a recorded message for triple-0 calls, urging people to ring a telehealth line if it wasn’t urgent. Most people ring triple-0 because it’s urgent.
Lawyers say the Queensland State Government could find itself slugged with compensation lawsuits because of the state’s worsening ambulance response crisis.
Documents obtained by the Opposition covered three of Queensland’s busiest ambulance stations – Southport, Brisbane and Maroochydore. One disclosure revealed significant delays at Southport over several days with one patient waiting 10.5 hours for an ambulance last October.
Shadow Health Minister Ros Bates says frontline staff are overworked and under-resourced and doing an incredible job under the toughest conditions.
When former Labor premier Anna Bligh referred to the ramping crisis as a “basket case’’ in 2011, the ramping figures were 32 per cent.
Ramping is now over 50 per cent at major South East hospitals. Expect health to be the centrepiece of the LNP’s bid for election.
Read related topics:Anthony Albanese