Leaders Steven Miles and David Crisafulli respond to latest reader question

Properly resourced hospitals, real time data and getting health boards “working the way they should” are some of the key focuses for David Crisafulli in response to a reader question.

Premier Steven Miles and David Crisafulli have responded to the latest reader question of the campaign.

The question came from Ridgelands reader Lynda Harding who asked how they would reduce hospital waiting times for patients to receive urgent surgery?

READER QUESTION

How will you reduce hospital waiting times for patients to receive urgent surgery?

DAVID CRISAFULLI

“Surgery by making sure that the hospitals are properly resourced and running the way that they should.

“And when we speak to doctors and nurses, they tell us that there has been a culture where power has been centralised back in Brisbane, rather than putting the doctors and nurses back in charge. So it’s about better resources.

“It’s about sharing data in real time to drive that cultural change, and above all, getting those health and hospital boards to work the way that they should.

“They were set up as a way of decentralising power. They were set up about accountability, having local people who understand their regions and understand healthcare driving that change.

Opposition Leader David Crisafulli has outlined some of his plans to fix wait times at hospitals. Picture: NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

“And increasingly, what we’ve seen has been a reluctance for the government to empower people at the front line. Health care is important to us, and allowing people to have health services when they need them is important to us, and we do believe that the days of those long waits for surgeries should be a thing of the past.

“At the moment, there’s over 61,000 Queenslanders waiting for surgery.

“There’s about 287,000 Queenslanders waiting to see a specialist to get on that waiting list, and our commitment is to make sure that Queenslanders have world health care where they live when they need it, earlier.”

STEVEN MILES

Premier Steven Miles. Picture: John Gass

“So the 11 per cent increase to the health budget that we delivered this year has driven a very significant improvement in elective surgery wait times. And I’m really pleased about that. “That is more Queenslanders getting the surgery that they need within clinically recommended times. In fact, we are at near record lows in terms of long waits.”