Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Two weeks ago I tabled and then spoke to my palliative care petition, which was signed by more than 4,000 Australians who care about palliative care. Later this week, I intend to table petitions with more signatories. Tonight, I want to speak about the palliative care service in South Brisbane that the Queensland state government is going to close down. In fact, the palliative care service at Canossa hospital would already have been closed but for people power in Queensland and—imagine this—the incompetence of the Queensland government. They could not even get their act together to achieve one of the savings they claimed to so desperately need to pay off the cost of the Queensland Health payroll mess. They hope to save a miserable $1.8 million by closing down the publicly funded beds at Canossa Private Hospital in South Brisbane.

The South Brisbane area currently has two level 3 palliative care services. Level 3 is the highest level of palliative care service there is. These services are at the St Vincent hospice service, which has 30 beds, 18 of which are public, and the Metro South Palliative Care Service, which currently has seven publicly funded beds located at Canossa Private Hospital. Both these services provide high-quality care and services, and both are working to full capacity.

In the June budget, the Queensland state government announced 10 new palliative care beds for the QEII Jubilee Hospital, but they forgot to mention that the hospital has not been finished yet and the beds are not, in fact, new beds; they simply replace the publicly funded palliative care beds at Canossa Private Hospital, which currently operates and has patients. The beds announced in the budget must be additional beds if the government is to call them 'new beds', not beds taken away from another service.

For the Labor state government to even contemplate taking these beds away from the Canossa Private Hospital is bewildering to say the least, because of what this hospital has to offer. Patients of Canossa palliative care unit—people who are terminally ill—and their families and friends, cannot praise enough the level of care that it provides. These patients know what they are talking about because they have had very considerable experience within the hospital system in all its incarnations.

Canossa provides a peaceful, caring and serene environment and a high level of care for its patients. Patients say that the staff are simply wonderful. Staff are compassionate because they have a deep understanding of what patients and their families are going through. That is what good palliative care means—well trained and understanding staff. It is worth remembering that it is not only the patients who need the physical, spiritual and emotional support but also family members. That is what good palliative care means—a holistic approach to the impending death of a loved one. Otherwise family members are left to process not only their loss but also the way in which their loved one died.

It is not only exemplary care that Canossa Private Hospital provides; it also provides excellent training for palliative care medical specialists—another must for good palliative care—and can provide training for palliative care nurses and other professionals involved in offering palliative care. These are all absolute necessities for good, holistic palliative care.

Nationally, there is a critical shortage of palliative care medical specialists, yet the registrar training program at Canossa is the largest registrar training program in Queensland and provides doctors with vitally important skills in the palliative care area. These are much needed skills which will cease to be taught at Canossa if the state Labor government has its way. Research has shown that medical specialists treat the underlying condition but often overlook taking care of the palliative care needs of a patient, such as ensuring the most basic of things like managing pain appropriately or managing the support needed by a patient's family.

A strategy paper released earlier this year by the Australian Pain Management Association made the point that one-third of older Australians live in chronic pain. It identified huge gaps in knowledge and the services available to Australians living with pain. Amongst those gaps was the inadequate pain relief for end-of-life care.

We must remember that palliative care is different to acute care. It is not uncommon to see palliative care patients, sometimes in chronic pain, waiting for hours in accident and emergency wards in Queensland hospitals and then being admitted to an acute ward that does not have the skill set to deal with palliative care patients.

We have a growing and an ageing population. In Queensland, the total population is just over 4½ million and the Metro South Health Service District, which Canossa Private Hospital falls under, has a catchment population of 1.34 million people. As I said, not only is our population growing, but it is ageing. It is therefore inconceivable that the Queensland government plans to take away these desperately needed palliative care beds from South Brisbane. Something is seriously wrong with both our federal and state health systems and our priorities if I have to make this argument.

Last year a petition was tabled in the Queensland parliament and a rally was held objecting to the closure of the public palliative care beds at Canossa hospital. I refer to the people power I spoke about earlier. That was partly the reason for a delay to the closure but, as I said, the other reason for the delay was the ineptitude of the Queensland government, which could not get anything else happening.

I urge the Queensland state government to listen to the people and to provide recurrent funding to Canossa Private Hospital for these palliative care beds. Across Australia we do not have enough palliative care beds. In Brisbane's Metro South area we do not have enough palliative care beds.

There was a paper released last year by Palliative Care Victoria, which gave a short summary of the growing body of evidence on the benefits of palliative care. It outlined a study conducted in 2008 of 33 high quality systematic literature reviews and 89 intervention studies and concluded that there is strong to moderate evidence that palliative care improves important aspects of end-of-life care, such as reducing a patient's distressing symptoms and relieving some of the burden on caregivers. Any of us can put ourselves in the situation and think about what it actually means when we talk about relieving the distressing symptoms of a terminally ill person or assisting their care givers. I think that would give us a better picture of what we have to do here.

Studies of a range of palliative care interventions from Europe, Canada, Australia and the US demonstrate that good palliative care leads to consistent improve­ment in pain and other symptoms, to consistent improvement in patient and family satisfaction, and to the likelihood that the patient will receive care, and die, in the place of their choice—usually, and I think quite unsurprisingly, their home. That is not a common occurrence right now.

The evidence that palliative care delivers quality-of-life benefits and better use of limited health resources provides a strong case for increased funding of palliative care as an integral part of our health and aged care services; not the miserable and counterproductive approach of the Queensland government.

In closing, I urge the Queensland state government to keep the publicly funded beds at Canossa Private Hospital open. They should not be shut down.