Qld Health: Still killing people

On the days before this article was published in October 2025, throughout Queensland, a group of hospitals discovered and investigated large numbers of patients undergoing vital x-rays and other tests not treated and not followed up with dire consequences for some including death from untreated cancer.   

Ron is waiting to die. The terminal cance that assails him has been carefully documented by the health department for the last two years beginning with a blood test, The Prostate Specific antigen (PSA) the elevation of which indicated that Ron most likely had prostate cancer.

As the test remained elevated and then began to rise further, strongly suggesting a problem, Ron underwent more detailed tests and x-rays, sonography and computer scans.

An elevated test does not always indicate cancer. There can be other reasons for its elevation but Ron’s continued to rise and both physical examination and scans confirmed it, Ron had cancer.

As the years went by Ron underwent further tests and bookings were made for him to have explorative surgery. I said bookings because as each date was sent and the time came for his surgery, time and time again it was cancelled. The surgeon was on leave, emergencies had come into the hospital, there were no beds, the variety of excuses seemed endless.

Ron needed support over this time so the hospital allocated a Prostate Cancer nurse to support him. Ron found the nurse very blunt. As an older man he felt very uncomfortable with her. Often she cancelled appointments. He really had no idea what she was supposed to do. Maybe she could hurry things along.

Then after two years there came that final meeting with the surgeon.

 The doctor was sorry. It had gone on too long. The cancer had become too far advanced. There was secondary spread. Nothing more could be done.  

Ron was dumbfounded. He did not know what to say. He was a retired concreter, a hard worker. His family had drifted away. He lived alone. He went and sat in his room. The last two years had been a steady, horrible fear-filled descent. The grave opened up before him.

 The Health Department had carefully documented in exquisite detail with multiple expensive tests; Ron’s progress along the road to death.

Ron knows nothing about the medieval artist Durer but as one contemplates that painting, Knight Death and the Devil.  it seems to mimic Ron’s journey toward his end.  In the middle there rides with the doomed knight, the figure of the devil like the Health Department now and then taunting him with an hour glass, showing him that his time is running out.

Ron is not alone there are hundreds perhaps even thousands like him as it now comes to light how for all these men and women the Health Department has failed either to follow up or treat.

 How can it be in the modern age that a common condition among men, easily and successfully treated, can kill in such a cruel but well documented manner.

To further prove the extent of the problem there is Mark who lives in the same hostel in a building just across from Ron.

Two and a half years after undergoing the same blood test that Ron had, Mark had an MRI scan that showed that he had prostate cancer. This was the Health Department in Mackay.

Mark then began to undertake a similar journey to Ron except that the follow up suddenly ceased and although he was told that when he moved to a larger city his records would be sent, this did not happen.

When he went to the Health Department in the next city he demanded to know what was happening and they responded by telling him that he was on a waiting list and like Ron had provided him with a Prostate Cancer Nurse, the same rather gruff one Ron had been given.

Mostly her appointments with him were cancelled without explanation but eventually when Mark threatened litigation the Health Department immediately booked him into a private hospital at government expense and he had his prostate removed there.

Again he was told that because the procedure had been so delayed the entire prostate gland and surrounding tissue was destroyed. Mark would not die he was told but his sexual function had been completely destroyed. He was in his fifties. He was however consoled by the surgeon. At least he did not die.

These poor patients, and it turns out that there are many of them, can be found everywhere in the state. In the very same hostel living one floor below is Mary  who is sixty one.

She went to the doctor six months before Roy got his terrible news, with a small lump on her right arm. The female doctor could not identify the lump but sent her for an echo scan which showed a lump of unknown nature but did no help diagnosis otherwise.

 The doctor shortly afterwards left the practice to move to another city. She did not bother to arrange referral or follow-up.

 “Why didn’t she biopsy the lump straightaway, cut it out and send it to the laboratory?” I asked her.

Mary shrugged.  After repeated calls she was given another appointment with another doctor. Nothing more was done. Eventually now, six months later, the lump is the size of a large apple.  Any junior doctor knows that you don’t Xray external lumps, you biopsy.

Finally, Mary was sent to a surgeon who did a biopsy and told her that it was cancer, a sarcoma, a type of muscular neoplasm. And with that diagnosis she faced an expensive course of radiation and chemotherapy which forced her to move to Brisbane to undergo the treatment that lasted for several weeks. She only retains partial use of her arm.

The disappearance of investigative journalists, and the reliance on the web for news all means that this department has been able to evade responsibility for these deaths and these errors, until recently, when it was discovered that 6,000 x-rays and scans for patients with serious conditions at one major hospital in the south were not followed up.

One patient who had cancer and had not been told the Xray results or followed up, and, several independent news sources reported, staggered into accident and emergency and promptly died.

In late October 2025 another cache of x-rays have not been followed up in the Northern Hospital of Townsville.

An article in that city’s Morning Bulletin paper dated October 31st reported that 218 patients had been “lost to the system” and of a further total of 576 patients, half were not followed up.

One of these is the dying Ron of this article. The Government finally admitted that some of these patients, of 576, would probably die.

The problems are manifest and extend throughout the hospital system. A recent survey of health staff noted that 70% of those employed by this department have been assaulted often by other health staff working there. This indicates that the system is under severe stress. It is grossly dysfunctional.

The Queensland Health Department is one of the largest and most inefficient health facilities in the Western world.

I have produced a book This Must not Happen Again which is the subject of this website and it details many past incidents that prove that the Health Department has many years of inefficiency and fatal neglect of patients. Let us be clear what fatal neglect means. People have died, unnecessarily.

There has been no change and no improvement since I wrote this book and as these recent press releases indicate it is growing worse.

Almost every day some new horror emerges in which some poor soul has been let down in the process of seeking treatment for a serious condition.

The explanation is not difficult, as I reveal in the book. The abolition of discreet area boards which were not only efficient but produced one of the world’s most effective health care systems was to prove a disaster as I have been at pains to detail.

 In the old system doctors, including specialists, lived in a tight community and were in touch with and remembered most of the serious cases they dealt with.

The system has become so large and remote now that thousands have tests and x-rays which are not followed up properly. As with Mary, staff treat and diagnose patients then move on and forget them.

These smaller hospital districts provided care throughout the state especially in the bush and in regional locations. Now decent medical care outside the cities has all but collapsed and because of over centralisation, patients have to travel many miles by road and air to get treatment.

The book details the worse kinds of excess and abuse, including public servants stealing large amounts of money, in one case 16 million dollars. It tells of Computer systems purchased to run salary and pay systems that wound up costing over a billion dollars with nothing to show for it.

It details unqualified specialists, including surgeons treating patients who have terrible outcomes as a result of this mismanagement but the system is more preoccupied with covering things up rather than fixing them.

The person most responsible for the unwieldy behemoth that the Health Department has become is Kevin Rudd who at that time was the Head of Public Service for the Goss government in the 1990s.

Rudd engineered to the dismemberment  of regional boards and the construction of the huge monstrosity that the Health Department has become..  The government was warned at the time by the medical profession what the end result would be a vast inefficient department that employed thousands of staff, many more public servants than clinicians.

This unwieldy mess of a government structure will not be improved by computer technology, including AI and as was demonstrated with the payroll program that wasted many millions of dollars, it will only be made worse.

Queensland Health must urgently be broken down into manageable segments where clinical staff have control over medical procedures, investigations and equipment.

Public servants don’t see patients. There are now more of them then staff who treat patients. They go home at night at 4.30 pm after their shifts and do not worry about the poor individuals in hospital beds.

This article has merely highlighted, put a human face to, the poor people who have been hurt by the system and in many cases been allowed to die without proper treatment. When the system becomes as large as Queensland Health, no one, the politicians, the press or even the general public seem to care anymore, that is, until they become its casualties.