weekly hansard - Queensland Parliament - Queensland Government

2574 Matters of Public Interest 23 Aug 2005
the first person to be diagnosed with breast cancer at Nambour in 1993, was also at the launch. She is
alive and well and clear of cancer and is a living testimony of courage to all women everywhere.
Today the trend is very encouraging in that survival rates for women diagnosed with breast cancer
are improving. The five-year survival rate for women aged 50 to 69 years diagnosed with breast cancer
has improved to nearly 90 per cent and can be attributed to screening, improvements in management
and treatment, and advances in drug therapy. Death rates from breast cancer have been decreasing by
nearly three per cent per year. By contrast, more women are now dying from lung cancer than breast
cancer, with the rate increasing by 2.8 per cent per year. I call on the federal government to fund a
nationwide antismoking campaign directed at the advertisers’ target market—young girls. The health of
Queensland women is of paramount importance to this government, and I would like to see the federal
government run a nationwide anti domestic violence campaign to eradicate this scourge that impacts on
the lives of women and girls. Given the high incidence of domestic violence and the impact it has on
women’s health, it stands to reason that the Howard government, instead of finding new ways to
oppress women, as it is with its imminent industrial laws—because it will be women who are most
affected—needs to invest in improving the lives of women and girls, as does this government. In closing,
I want to give a heartfelt thanks to Dr Chris Galbraith—
Time expired.
Health System
Dr FLEGG (Moggill—Lib) (12.30 pm): Queenslanders can expect to hear a lot more from the de
facto health minister, the Premier, claiming that he has learned his lesson, he has listened to the
community, he has taken on board Morris’s findings and he is fixing the health system. Tragically, this
government has learned nothing out of the health crisis, apart from efforts to save its own political skin.
After months of resisting calls to release Queensland’s secret waiting lists and pretending that
they did not exist, the government was forced to provide information to the Morris royal commission that
it had collected and kept secret since 1 July 2004—108,000 Queenslanders on secret waiting lists.
These are Queenslanders the government pretended did not exist—patients who had already been
assessed by a doctor and had been referred largely to surgeons in the public hospital system. The
government used outpatient departments as a filter to ensure that published elective surgery waiting
lists gave them the political outcome they sought.
We had the amazing statement by the health minister claiming that this information had been
collected only as a one-off on 1 July 2004. What an embarrassment! With 108,000 people waiting for
predominantly surgical treatment, the government not only pretended they did not exist but also then
claimed that it did not even bother to look at how many people were stuck on these waiting lists. The
failure of the government to publish honest and complete waiting lists for Queensland costs more lives
than the tragedy of Dr Patel in Bundaberg as thousands of patients and their doctors who advise them
have absolutely no idea how many people are ahead of them on the queue or how long they must wait.
This government has learned absolutely nothing and is still continuing to follow its tired and failed way of
administering the health system, and that is to produce political outcomes, sanitise waiting lists, deceive
patients and their doctors and hide information of vital importance from the community in Queensland.
Another of the major lessons to come out of the Morris inquiry that this government has not
learned is that decisions relating to the medical care of patients must be made by doctors and nurses
and that the clinical work force must be empowered so that they are in a position to make these choices
for their patients. The backbone of the medical work force has always been the visiting medical officer.
They are our most senior specialists. They are charged not just with treating patients but with
supervising more junior doctors and with training the next generation of specialists. We cannot have an
effective public hospital system without a strong representation of senior medical staff as visiting
medical officers. The target for this state for visiting medical officers should be at least 75 per cent of all
the specialists in the state. These are people who can then make a contribution in the public hospital
system. Yet we have seen the work force decimated as an act of deliberate government policy to the
point where we are down to around 30 per cent of the state’s specialists making a contribution as
visiting medical officers.
Once again we see the government failing because it has no understanding of how to deal with
the professional staff who deliver health care. The end result is that we have driven VMOs out of the
system in droves. We have replaced one former union official health minister with another former union
official health minister who can see industrial relations only in terms of unions where the membership is
expected to do what it is told to do by the union leadership. The government gazetted directives to
VMOs despite an agreement already having been reached previously with Queensland Health. Now the
government wants to insist on an interim agreement until next year before protracted negotiations can
even begin, effectively leaving the VMO work force of Queensland without any agreed terms of
employment for a protracted period.
What is really burning at the ranks of senior medical staff and the major reason they are deserting
Queensland’s public hospitals in droves is the total disfranchisement of doctors in relation to matters of