ARIANA DEELEY
The Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital will receive a $70 million funding boost to address a number of complaints and issues since opening last November.
The announcement came after the Australian Medical Association held a crisis meeting with Health Minister, Cameron Dick Monday evening, demanding changes to the under staffed and under facilitated hospital.
Australian Medical Association Queensland President, Chris Zappala said although community frustration is justifiable, we now need to support the hospital staff and the community to help change the negative culture surrounding the hospital.
“The difficulties that the staff have been having, and the patients and families, have been well documented from when the hospital first opened so I think there’s a justifiable sense of frustration that it’s taken this amount of time to get a response,” Mr Zapalla said.
“We don’t want to have negativity in place now that there has been some recognition of the systems problems that they’ve been dealing with, and now they have been practically addressed and dealt with we need to support the staff in a positive way to really realize the potential in the hospital.”
Another 31 beds, 100 staff and new technology systems along with an extra medical retrieval team will be added to the hospital under the new plan announced by Mr Dick in Parliament on Tuesday.
Mr Zapalla added, whilst there have been a series of documented issues with the hospital, families shouldn’t be concerned by the level of medical care patients receive.
“We have an excellent standard of medicine in Queensland and Australia, and that’s never been a doubt, but the systems now to support our clinicians up at the hospital, hopefully they will be better so that our clinicians are not shackled or hindered in any way in providing that good care,” he said.
“I think families and patients and the whole community can be optimistic that it’s going to be onward and upwards from here.”