Region must rail against closure of Gympie Hospital Children’s Ward

If our leaders don’t start making some noise, if our community does not fight this unacceptable loss, Qld Health bean counters will take our silence for acceptance and permanently close the Gympie Hospital Children’s Ward. For our children’s sake, this cannot happen.

Gympie Hospital.

It behoves those paid handsomely to represent this region to find their voices and use their extensive resources to ensure Queensland Health and the Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service do not rob the Gympie Hospital of its Children’s Ward.

We have already lost our private hospital with barely a whimper to be heard, and over the past few decades have watched the steady depletion of resources and services from our public hospital.

All of this while our region continues to grow and grow and grow.

At what point to those pushing pens on the Sunshine Coast and in Brisbane recognise that Gympie region families deserve and need basic services and health care for their children, that do not require driving south for an hour?

As a community we cannot let them take our Children’s Ward.

Wide Bay MP Llew O’Brien is a powerful man with powerful friends in national politics. He says this issue of the Children’s Ward isn’t his problem because health is a matter for the state.

He has been silent.

Llew, we need you to step up.

Gympie State MP Tony Perrett is in opposition and has been happy to add his comments to the public discourse and advise those trying to fight this on the best way to go about it.

But he needs to up his game, and be as dogged and vocal about his issue as he was about the getting USC access to a vacant building at Gympie TAFE site. This is actually life and death.

Tony Perrett MP standing out the front of the Gympie Hospital which is fighting to save its Children’s Ward.

Mayor Glen Hartwig and his councillors need to start writing letters, issuing statements and setting meetings; using their office to stop something truly bad and unacceptable from happening to our region.

The permanent closure of our Children’s Ward must not happen. Our hospital needs us to fight for it. People in the public service are afraid to speak out for fear of being punished.

Our children need us to fight for them.

Please sign the E-Petition to Save Our Children’s Ward at THIS LINK

Write to the Health Minister, write to the SCHHS, send us your letters to the editor and we will publish them and add your voice to the chorus of voices trying to stop this.

We must not go quietly into that good night, for our children’s sake.

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