FUNDING: Health Minister Cameron Dick. Picture: Shae Beplate. Source: News Corp Australia
PART of a $30 million State Government funding splash aims to slash the wait times of almost 3500 Cairns region residents who are in need of medical attention.
The Government has released details of how the funding would be spent, with Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service securing $2.4 million from the pool.
“What this means in practice is that around 1990 people around Cairns waiting for an outpatient appointment and around 1480 people waiting for an endoscopy will have their work brought forward,” Barron River MP Craig Crawford said.
“We’ve been able to find that money from uncommitted funds in the Health Department’s purchasing pool and it shows the emphasis that this Government is putting on frontline government services that will benefit Queenslanders who need those services.”
The $30 million was announced by Health Minister Cameron Dick in early March as part of an answer to the more than 100,000 Queenslanders waiting longer than clinically recommended for an outpatient or diagnostic appointment.
The money will fund more than 10,000 additional specialist outpatient appointments, more than 5000 extra endoscopies and more than 2000 additional inpatient procedures statewide, and will be rolled out over the next two months.
Mr Dick said he was always open and honest in saying that this would not be sufficient to fix the backlog of 114,000 patients on the outpatient wait list “but it is a start on what is a substantial problem”.
But Opposition health spokesman Mark McArdle said he believed the Labor Government was confusing the elective surgical waiting list and the outpatients waiting list, and slammed Mr Dick’s move to scrap the LNP’s wait time guarantee initiative.
“When we came to government there were 6485 patients waiting longer than clinically recommend for their elective surgery,” Mr McArdle said.
“In February 2015, only 102 were waiting longer than clinically recommended.
“In March 2012, in Cairns alone 398 patients were waiting longer than recommend. In March 2015, this was down to 42.
“The outpatients waiting list had continued to grow under Labor, but we arrested the rate of growth and stabilised it while continuing to see more people.
“The wait time guarantee was working.”
The Labor Government has set an elective surgery target of having 98 per cent of urgent cases receiving their surgery within the clinically recommended time of 30 days, and 95 per cent of other patients receiving their treatment within the clinically recommended time.