Wednesday, 8th March, 2006

The magnitude of the breakdown in Queensland's public hospital system becomes apparent when the Government has to outsource a government hospital's emergency service. This week private company Aspen Medical won a $7 million contract to provide doctors and a nurse educator to keep Caboolture Hospital's emergency department open for a year. If the government's Queensland Health could have found the doctors themselves the cost would have been $3.5 million.

Certainly the health bureaucrats tried to solve the staffing crisis. Back in January they persuaded the Public Service Commissioner George O'Farrell to temporarily abolish the need to advertise job vacancies and make appointments on merit. For three months until mid-April they are free to grab any doctors capable of doing the jobs but the crisis of confidence in the Queensland public health system has made it difficult to gain recruits. Hence the emergency solution to emergency care. Call in a Canberra based doctor provider who has more flexibility to pay over the odds to get the staff needed at Caboolture.

Not that outsourcing is going to provide an easy answer. For a start there will be resentment at the additional financial incentives paid at Caboolture to contract doctors that are not available to staff doctors elsewhere in the system. Salary bills are sure to ratchet upwards before Premier Peter Beattie can claim to have averted this crisis.

Note: Caboolture Hospital is in the Pumicestone electorate north of Brisbane and the ALP holds it with a majority of 5.4%.

(See earlier story Merit Appointments Temporarily Abandoned for Doctors 23 Jan 2006)