Qld hospitals in meltdown, Oppn says
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The Townsville hospital has been forced to open wards in conference rooms and cancel elective surgery. (ABC TV)
Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg says the worst health crisis ever seen in Queensland has emerged this week.
Elective surgery has also been cancelled at two regional Queensland hospitals this week as emergency departments struggle to cope with an influx of patients.
The Queensland head of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, Dr Sylvia Andrew-Starkey, has said major public hospitals in the state's south-east are playing "musical bypass".
Dr Andrew-Starkey said she referred information to Queensland Health about patients who died because they could not get a hospital bed.
Mr Springborg says hospitals from Townsville to the New South Wales border are in meltdown and doctors are leaving because they can no longer work under the Queensland Health bureaucracy.
The Townsville Hospital has cancelled more elective surgery cases today.
Twenty-one operations have been cancelled in the past three days after the hospital was put on 'code yellow - or internal disaster status - earlier this week.
A hospital spokesperson says more elective cases will be cancelled on Monday.
Mr Springborg says if the Liberal National Party (LNP) wins power at the next election things will go back to the way they were before Labor's 10 year reign in Queensland.
"We'd run the state hospital system the way that we ran it in the 1990s, where the commentators generally admit that we did a far better job than our predecessor in the Government that came after," he said.
"Hospitals are not only about writing out cheques - it's all about management, it's about making sure that you've got your resources going into front-end services."
Late yesterday, Mr Robertson again said there are multiple problems that need to be dealt with.
"People keep saying I'm blaming this and I'm blaming that," he said.
"What I'm trying to do is explain the range of pressures that we're under."
Mr Robertson says it is time for a constructive discussion about the pressures on public hospitals.
"There are multiple pressure points and we've got to deal with each of them, but first of all we've actually got to have an open and honest discussion about the pressure points in our hospital system," he said.
Opposition health spokesman Mark McArdle says an LNP government will have a policy of taking money away from bureaucracy and spending it on staff, equipment and beds.
"That's where the money has to go - not into fat salaries of bureaucrats that is gobbling up large chunks of the Queensland Health budget and it's denying the hospitals the resources and the manpower they need to treat sick Queenslanders," he said.
"We'll release our policy in a short to medium period of time and it will deal with the issues that I've raised.
"But we are committed to making sure that these funds get down where they're needed."
