“Failing of primary care” Health Minister points to GP crisis

Health Minister Yvette D’Ath has blamed unaffordable GP visits for a spike in serious emergency presentations, which is clogging our EDs.

Health Minister Yvette D’Ath says a failing GP system is leading to a flood of people clogging emergency departments, with the number of patients with life-threatening conditions turning up at hospitals spiking.

Speaking from Logan Hospital on Saturday, Ms D’Ath said the rise in the number of people presenting with serious and acute conditions at EDs was “absolutely indicative of a failing primary care system in this country”.

“Access to GPS is less affordable and less accessible than it’s ever been before,” she said.

“And if you can get into a GP, you can’t get that holistic care, because the way the system is set up it’s just churn and seeing as many patients as possible each day.

“Which means that you don’t get to spend that hour with that patient, which might have meant they don’t end up in an ED and they don’t end up in a hospital.

“You’re seeing them in 15 minutes and you’re seeing them possibly less frequently or not at all, and people end up chronically ill.”

Queensland Health Minister Yvette D'Ath speaks to media. Picture: Kevin Farmer

Queensland hospitals recorded a spike in the number of seriously-ill emergency department attendees in the last quarter, with more than 4500 category 1 and 94,000 category 2 patients.

Ms D’Ath also addressed this week’s Auditor-General report into the state’s health system, which found more than 100,000 Queenslanders were waiting longer to see a specialist doctor – a surge of 80 per cent in seven years.

The elective surgery wait lists has also risen to almost 60,000.

But she said it was important not to go “too fast” in getting elective surgeries completed – a lesson she said the health system learned after elective surgery resumed following a blanket ban during the initial Covid pandemic.

“When we came out of 2020 we fast-tracked elective surgery and we got our numbers back to almost pre-Covid numbers. Our staff did exceptionally well,” she said.

“But when you fill every bed with elective surgery, it means you’re taking away bed capacity for emergency.

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“The Auditor’s report did not show us anything that we didn’t already know, and isn’t already publicly available. Performance data is out there. We know these lists are growing.

“We know that we have had a once in a lifetime significant disruption to our health system. “We always have had growth in demand but we’ve never had in our generation, our lifetimes, we’ve never had this sort of disruption in a health system where they have had to continually suspend elective surgery. So we are seeing an increase.”

Ms D’Ath was attending Logan Hospital’s inaugural Careers Fairs – an initiative to encourage residents to consider one of the new 1500 roles which will become available over the next two years as the $1bn expansion is completed.

“You can’t invest in capital expansion projects in health and not invest in staff, so I commend the Metro South HHS for taking this innovative approach to entice locals to look at careers with their local health service,” she said.

“One of the key strategies to deal with the global shortage of healthcare workers is to grow our own. That’s why days like today go a long way in encouraging people to consider a career in health.”