VAD Qld: Premier concedes palliative care not available to all

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has admitted she cannot guarantee a service identified by experts as key to controversial euthanasia laws.

Annastacia Palaszczuk has conceded palliative care services can’t be offered in every community, as Indigenous elders plead for more funding to allow people to die on country.
The Premier’s admission followed renewed calls this week for the State Government to urgently provide greater funding for targeted palliative care packages and expert staff.

Kalkadoon woman, Indigenous elder and former long-term health worker Noelene Dempsey said yesterday she wasn’t aware of any funding that helped people to die on country.

“That’s important to us,” she said.

A special investigation by The Courier-Mail and Sunday Mail last weekend revealed Queenslanders are dying in emergency rooms as underfunded palliative care services deny people dignity at the end of their life.

Experts are crying out for the State Government to provide an additional $247 million a year to plug the funding gaps, with exhausted workers believing the sector was already in crisis.

While spruiking her Government’s funding commitments, the Premier said yesterday Queensland was a very decentralised state.

“So it is absolutely not physically possible to put in palliative care into every community in Queensland,” she said.

“We know how important it is, we put that extra funding in so let’s see how that extra funding goes first.”

Toowoomba Indigenous elder Cheryl Bowe agreed there needed to be more funding for palliative care in the regions.

Referring to the proposed voluntary assisted dying legislation currently before Parliament, Katter’s Australian Party leader Robbie Katter said people were choosing to kill themselves now because they didn’t want to leave their families and travel to Townsville or Cairns to die.

He said the government had made “no real efforts” to improve palliative care and that Queensland’s Indigenous communities had been almost “voiceless” in the development of the VAD legislation.

Asked a raft of questions including whether the government would commit to providing the $247m funding, Health Minister Yvette D’Ath referred to the $171 million being delivered.

“This funding will help develop a new Palliative and End-Of-Life Care strategy to strengthen end of life care and improved equity of access and choice for Queenslanders and more frontline palliative care staff,” she said.

She did not comment on the concerns raised by the sector.

Opposition health spokeswoman Ros Bates said more funding should be provided.

She said the LNP conducted a parliamentary inquiry seven years ago into palliative care which recognised the need would only increase.