About one-fifth of surgeries at Sunshine Coast University Hospital (SCUH) have been outsourced to private facilities in a bid to cut lengthy waiting lists as thousands of people clamour for treatment.
More than 17,100 surgeries were performed at SCUH between 1 July 2017 and 31 May 2021, with about 3100 of them farmed out to private surgeons to help alleviate pressure on the public system.
The public surgeries are being contracted out to private doctors under the Queensland Government’s Surgery Connect program, which aims to offer timely care to patients who could have been forced to wait longer.
A further 380 surgeries will be tendered out in quarters two and three this year under the Surgery Connect program, a spokesperson for SCUH confirmed.
“This relates to the following specialties: ear, nose and throat, general surgery, ophthalmology, orthopaedic, paediatric, vascular and urology,” said the spokesperson.
Sunshine Coast Local Medical Association president Dr Roger Faint said the high number of public surgeries being outsourced from SCUH showed how “overwhelmed” the hospital was.
Even with thousands of those surgeries done in the private system, the list of people waiting for operations at SCUH was 3,899 in the last quarter, with many languishing for months and years.
“It shows the public system is not coping when you have so many people sent to the private sector; it’s an overwhelming of the public system,” said Dr Faint.
Dr Faint said massive population growth and the ageing population on the Coast were placing huge demand on the hospital, which opened in 2017, without enough extra funding being promised by government to keep pace.
“There is pressure to reduce costs in other ways, therefore they do less surgery. It’s easier to not spend and let people suffer than to let people have their surgeries in a timely fashion,” said Dr Faint.
As Sunshine Coast News recently revealed, waiting lists for life-changing surgery are longer at SCUH than the state’s biggest hospitals including the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, especially in orthopaedics, general surgery and ear, nose and throat.
The situation is so bad that patients in extreme pain who have waited with no end in sight are taking matters into their own hands and seeking public treatment in Brisbane, where they are getting the surgery they need within weeks.
According to the Queensland Government’s own advertisements for tender, Surgery Connect is an arrangement between the public and private systems to help cut surgical waiting lists.
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The program functions as a “release valve for the public system, allowing public patients to receive timely care in the private health sector when they would otherwise have waited for a longer period of time on a public waiting list”.
The State Government seeks Expressions of Interest (EOI) for the procurement of surgical services from owners and/or operators of licensed private facilities.
“The current focus of the Surgery Connect program is primarily on delivering Category 2 and Category 3 elective surgery. However, providers under the program may also be asked to provide other health services,” says the government advertisement.
A spokesperson for SCUH said the Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service received a share of the Queensland Government’s $250 million funding in December 2020 to clear the elective surgery backlog created by COVID-19.
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“This initiative has had a significant impact on SCUH’s waiting lists,” said the spokesperson.
The spokesperson said the Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service received about 2500 referrals from GPs each week.
The longest wait-time for specialty referral is for Gynaecology Category 3 appointment which is approximately 29 months,” said the spokesperson.
“To address this, we have introduced additional clinical pathways of care for Gynaecology recently with the introduction of GPSI (GPs with Special Interests) led Colposcopy clinics.”
