Minister for Health slams LNP wait time gimmick

Health Minister Cameron Dick said today that advice from the Health Department vindicated the government’s move to scrap the Liberal National Party’s gimmicky program on waiting lists.

Mr Dick said that reports that referred to departmental advice allegedly supporting the program were wrong.

“The top-level advice to me as Minister was that there were a significant number of faults with the previous LNP Government’s Wait Time Guarantee program,” he said.

“The advice was that the WTG was focussed only on waiting times for elective surgery, which is only one part of the patient journey which includes specialist appointments and diagnostic testing.

“It also explicitly says that the WTG did not involve any extra funds to deliver extra surgery. Sizable funds - $77 million – were directed towards communications, marketing and administration rather than services to patients.

“In short, it was a policy thought up by Lawrence Springborg when he was Health Minister to employ spin doctors rather than doctors of medicine.”

Mr Dick said the department’s advice was the WTG had many major exemptions, such as that for the entire Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital.

“For example, documentation associated with the LNP’s failed WTG claimed that there were only 102 people waiting for elective surgery on February 1 – but this didn’t take into account the 222 long waits at Lady Cilento,” he said.

“It underlines what I’ve been saying about this failed WTG program – that it took no account of the needs of Queenslanders,” he said.

Mr Dick said that while waiting times had come down in Queensland over the past few years, this was largely because of a massive injection of funds from the Federal Government through Labor’s National Partnership on Elective Surgery.

“There is no doubt that the advice from the Department of Health to me as Minister showed that there were significant problems with Mr Springborg’s failed WTG program,” he said.

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