LNP blamed for staff exodus from Queensland’s new children’s hospital

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The front entrance to the now closed down Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane,
The entrance to the now closed down Royal children’s hospital in Brisbane. The hospital was replaced by the $1.5bn Lady Cilento children’s hospital. Photograph: Dan Peled/AAP

Queensland’s new major children’s hospital is suffering an exodus of staff over problems rooted in it having been starved of proper funding by the former Newman government, a health workers’ union claims.

The Palaszczuk Labor government has announced an independent review of the $1.5bn Lady Cilento children’s hospital in Brisbane in response to complaints ranging from overworked staff to poor quality food.

Health minister Cameron Dick said the review by an expert panel would not be “a witch hunt” but “about capturing lessons” for new hospitals in the future.

But Alex Scott, state secretary of the Together Union, said the review would show that if the government was committed to “quality healthcare” in public hospitals, it had little choice but to lift spending and resources.

Scott said problems in the hospital, which included an exodus of overworked staff and the “complete failure” of outsourced food and cleaning services, had to be dealt with as a “priority” of the state health system.

While an early report into the hospital’s first fortnight of operation found no instances of patient harm, the deaths of two children have since been referred to the coroner.

Scott claimed the problems at Lady Cilento stemmed from the Newman government cutting corners on operations while being preoccupied with its own “wait time guarantee” program, which sought to fast-track surgery for non-emergency cases.

The board overseeing the hospital itself welcomed the removal of the wait time guarantee by the new government after complaints it was “diverting resources away from emergent cases and into trying to fix waiting lists for non emergent cases”, Scott said.

“We certainly think that any independent review will clearly show that the previous government put at risk healthcare results because of the surgery guarantee, the outsourcing of key functions but also the underfunding and under-resourcing of this hospital,” Scott said.

“We expect this report to show if we’re going to have quality healthcare this government, compared to to the previous government, is going to need to provide additional resources and capacity.”

Named after Lady Phyllis Cilento, the former mother-in-law of actor Sean Connery, the hospital is the only specialist children’s hospital in Queensland.

Scott said the problem of understaffing had been “made worse because the staff who are overworked are all quitting and they can’t actually fill all the vacancies they’ve got”.

The “complete failure” of the first example of “significant outsourcing” in a public Queensland hospital for catering, cleaning and patient transport should raise a flag for future hospitals, he said.

The former government had sought “false savings” that led to “real problems around the nature of the food that can be provided, some of the equipment, doctors having to push patients around because they can’t find wards people, and the cleaning not being up to scratch”, he said.

A clinical report on the hospital last month by Children’s Health Queensland found ongoing concerns about a “lack of understanding, knowledge and experience” of hospital needs among staff with private contractor Medirest.

“Examples provided included doors being left open in the mental health unit, delays in the transfer of patients to the operating theatre, wards or imaging services, and delays in cleaning beds for patients requiring admission,” it said.

Scott said the independent review was likely to “distill a range of the problems of the previous government’s approach to health, given the funding issues, the outsourcing issues, the guarantee, and the mismanagement for political purposes of the opening”.

The Newman government opened the hospital a month early after fully closing the two former children’s facilities in Brisbane, the Royal children’s and Mater children’s hospitals last November.