Jodie Allen latest person to join fight to save Children’s Ward

‘This won’t go away’: author and internet sensation Jody Allen has condemned Qld Health’s closure of the Gympie Hospital Children’s Ward as ‘abhorrent’, and says Health Minister Yvette D’Ath has ‘messed with the wrong people”.

Gympie internet sensation, author and mother-of-two Jody Allen is the latest identity to join the fight to save the Gympie Hospital Children’s Ward, and call out Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’Ath for her decision to close it.

Mrs Allen has lived in Gympie for 21 years and rose to popularity as a stay at home mum extraordinaire after she lost her job while pregnant with her second son, and worked tirelessly to make ends meet while on one wage.

She has since written four successful books and is the creator of one of Australia’s biggest online mother’s network, Stay At Home Mum.

Mrs Allen said while she had never had to use the Children’s Ward for her two sons Nate, 14, and Flynn, 13, the fact that Gympie patients were being transferred to Sunshine Coast University Hospital for specialist care despite increased funding was “abhorrent”.

Jody Allen and her family in 2020. Photo: Bambi Gosbell

“The government obviously has funding for specialist staff at Gympie Hospital, so I ask Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’Ath, why are you deliberately putting Gympie’s Children at risk when it seems like such a simple problem to fix?”

She also said she wondered if the lack of funding to the ward was due to Gympie not being a marginal political seat, and said she could not understand why the hospital’s services were decreasing with Gympie’s growing population.

“What other population of 50,000 is without access to a children’s ward within a 100km drive?” she said.

Mrs Allen praised the efforts of Gympie MP Tony Perrett and Wide Bay MP Llew O’Brien, but said more needed to be done to save the ward.

She also called out Health Minister Yvette D’Ath for the decision to close the ward in May, saying the people of Gympie would not give up on saving the ward.

“Minister Yvette D’Ath, you have messed with the wrong people, and this will not go away,” she said.

The Gympie Hospital Children’s Ward was closed in May by Ms D’Ath due to a lack of paediatric doctors.