Hospital horrors: Wheelchair patient had to ramp for three hours, documents reveal
One in three people at Queensland emergency departments are not seen in time while paramedics have abandoned their shifts due to exhaustion, the Liberal National Party says.
The LNP has taken aim at the state government, saying they have heard “horror stories” about a broken system after leaking more than 900 pages of Queensland Health data for December 2021 on Wednesday.
LNP leader David Crisafulli said there were instances of a wheelchair-bound patient left on a hospital ramp for three hours before receiving treatment and someone waiting more than 10 hours for an ambulance to arrive.
The documents also provided a disturbing insight into a paramedics’ workload, he said.
One was sent to an urgent job despite recording a “dangerously high fatigue rating”, later abandoning their shift.
Another was forced to sleep at the ambulance station after their shift then driving home due to “extreme exhaustion”.
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“This is further evidence of a broken system that the state government can no longer ignore,” Crisafulli said.
“It blows the whistle on a culture where patients are waiting for hours to be seen..where ambos are so stressed and so stretched that they…have had to use their own vehicle.
“For the sake of patients and our health workers we need to do better because lives are depending on it.”
Crisafulli said in the southeast, almost half of emergency department patients weren’t seen in time in Logan.
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At the Prince Charles Hospital it was 37 per cent while one in three were forced to wait at Redcliffe, Caboolture, the Redlands and Queen Elizabeth II Hospitals.
More than one in three patients at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, Logan and Caboolture were not seen in time for specialist surgery, he said.
He said overall almost 85,000 Queenslanders were on the waiting list for specialist appointments.
Data showed southeast ramping was worst at Logan with 55 per cent of ambulances waiting outside hospitals.
LNP MP Ros Bates said it was just as bad in regional areas after hearing from residents at their 12 “health crisis” town hall meetings, most recently in central Queensland.
“We heard of young mothers giving birth on the side of the road (at Chinchilla) where the birth certificate states the Warrego Highway,” she said.
“We have heard from people in Biloela who couldn’t get an ambulance.
“Rockhampton is ground zero for ambulance ramping in the region with 50 per cent of ambulances ramped there – that is not good enough.
“These figures show there was a problem well before COVID.”
Crisafulli believed solutions included more beds, better triage, releasing real time data and giving power back to frontline staff to make decisions.
“I’m hoping these documents finally spur on some action so we can fix the Queensland health crisis,” he said.
