Michelle Landry (Capricornia, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Queensland health system is broken. Individuals are falling through the cracks and need assistance to turn their lives around after waiting unacceptable times for medical procedures and for beds in aged care. Two aged-care facilities in Rockhampton have invited me to meetings in the past two weeks to discuss the crisis they are facing due to the lack of doctors and nurses servicing them. Benevolent Living, a newly refurbished, state-of-the-art aged-care facility, has 22 beds available right now that, due to the inability to clinically manage more residents, cannot be filled. These facilities have been relying on a fly-in fly-out GPs to treat their elderly residents and do not have enough nursing staff to care for the needs of existing residents. Aged-care residents are being sent to Rockhampton Hospital, where they wait for an unacceptable length of time. They are then sent back to Benevolent or other nursing homes, where they are then reassessed and then sent back to the hospital.

One solution to this issue is to connect clinics run by nurse practitioners to hospitals to relieve some of the minor cases. This situation is unacceptable and is placing enormous stress on the families having to care for elderly members while they await a bed in a facility.

The pressure on staff working within the aged-care sector is enormous. I will be holding an aged-care forum in Rockhampton to, hopefully, find a solution to this crisis.