SHOCKING new government figures released yesterday show some Cairns patients in urgent need of elective surgery are being made to wait more than a year.
As of March 31, in the group most critically in need of medical help (category 1), six patients in unidentified Queensland hospitals were listed as having waited more than a year for surgery that is clinically recommended to be carried out within one month.
Queensland Health will not reveal if any of the hospitals are in the Far North.
But in the next most urgent grouping (category 2), the figures show that at Cairns Base Hospital, 23 patients – 1 per cent of the total in that category – had waited more than a year for surgery that should be carried out within two months.
In category 3, 95 patients – or 21 per cent of the total – had waited longer than a year for their operations at Cairns Base. The proof that so many urgent patients were waiting so long for potentially life-saving surgery has stunned Opposition health spokesman John-Paul Langbroek, who was provided with the figures on request from Queensland Health yesterday.
"I think most Queenslanders would be stunned that there would be any number of patients waiting over a year for the most urgent operations," Mr Langbroek said.
"The minister needs to explain this.
"How would you feel if you were the family of one of those six people?"
"Or the thought that in Cairns if you’re in category 3 you have a one in five chance that you won’t be treated in a clinically safe time?"
In the "interests of openness and transparency", he called for Health Minister Stephen Robertson to reveal which hospitals had made their category 1 patients wait more than a year for surgery.
Senior Queensland Health bureaucrat Dr Stephen Duckett said identifying hospitals created a risk that the individual patients could be identified.
