Gympie Medical Transport blasts Qld Health on travel pay backlog

Queensland Health has been blasted for its staggering delay in travel cost reimbursements, with some patients left hundreds of dollars out of pocket for months.

One of the founders of a regional volunteer medical transport group has blasted Queensland Health over an “excessive” delay in repaying patients for travel costs, saying they are being left out of pocket for months.

Gympie Medical Transport co-ordinator Sally Carkeet said patients forced to travel outside the region for health services are waiting for repayment of hundreds of dollars in travel costs under the state’s reimbursement scheme.

Mrs Carkeet is owed more than $600 in travel for her appointments from December, 2022.

She accepted there would be some delays in reimbursement owing to the Christmas break, and the limited staff numbers processing claims.

“I didn’t think I’d start to get anywhere near the front of the queue until February,” she said.

“Now we’re in April. That’s wrong.”

She said the state’s Patient Travel Subsidy Scheme, which covers part of the cost for a patient who needs to travel more than 50km for treatment, was supposed to repay claims within 30 working days.

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Gympie Medical Transport's Sally Carkeet and Bev Goodall say their clients are being left in situations where they will simply not travel for health appointments as a result of the lengthy delays in receiving travel reimbursements from the state’s subsidy scheme.

But she said as of March, Nambour Hospital was still dealing with a backlog of 1100 applications from November 2022.

A Sunshine Coast Health and Hospital Service spokeswoman said it is “committed to processing our patients’ claims and this includes working with patients to make sure we have all of the information we need to process claims as quickly as possible”.

“We do experience a high volume of claims and our hardworking team has processed almost 8000 individual claims for Gympie residents since February 2022,” the spokeswoman said.

“We regularly monitor the volume of Patient Travel Subsidy Scheme applications and in response to the higher volumes, we have recently allocated additional resources to ensure a greater volume can be processed.”

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A Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service spokeswoman said more resources have been injected into processing the PTSS claims, and it had handled more than 8000 from Gympie region residents since February 2022.

Mrs Carkeet said the delays were “devastating for our clients”.

“When it takes three months to get money back, that’s not even funny,” she said.

“The majority of our clients are over 50, most of them are on pension, and most of them tell us on a daily basis how much they struggle with things.”

Mrs Carkeet said she was left feeling “demeaned” by the response she received from the health service in late March when she tried raising the issue.

It pointed towards incorrect paperwork, Covid, and increased demand for the PTSS as reasons for the delays.

She said she had years of experience with the applications without once having a paperwork problem flagged.

Gympie Medical Transport’s Sally Carkeet said the two-year-old service now had a client base of more than 1000 patients it drives outside the region for health services, many of which are over 50 years old and on a pension.

Instead, she said, the delays were forcing regional patients to make choices which would only cause more problems in the future.

“If people don’t get it back, they’re not going to go and their health is going to suffer,” Mrs Carkeet said.

“What’s the option: Do I have food this week or do I go and get my medical issues sorted out down in the Sunshine Coast?”

The delays highlighted another problem too.

Gympie Medical Transport had a client base of more than 1000 patients and was running a fleet of six cars, up from the two it started with in February 2021, because of the rise in demand.

“The answer of course is to bring some of these services back to Gympie,” she said.

“That would be ideal, in an ideal world.”