A Shorten Labor Government will improve outpatient waiting times and reduce pressure on the QEII Hospital with a $23.7 million investment in a new Specialist Care Centre at the hospital.

QEII provides vital services to people in Brisbane’s south. In 2017-18 alone the hospital provided around 23,000 admissions, 60,000 emergency department visits and 90,000 outpatient visits.

But the hard-working staff currently provide care in QEII’s ageing infrastructure. The main hospital building is almost 40 years old, and on an average day 95 per cent of its beds are occupied – well above the state-wide benchmark.

That’s why a Shorten Labor Government will invest $23.7 million to build a new Specialist Care Centre and reduce pressure on QEII.

Labor’s investment will deliver a new facility adjacent to the existing building, which will include specialist consulting rooms and allied health treatment rooms. The Specialist Care Centre will also include new education and training spaces, to be shared with Griffith University.

Crucially, Labor’s investment will also reduce pressure on QEII by moving outpatient services out of the main hospital building – freeing up space that can be refurbished in the future to provide inpatient care.

The new Specialist Care Centre will also be designed with future expansion in mind – the foundations will be engineered to enable later projects to be built on top of the initial structure.

This investment is part of Labor’s plan to invest $1 billion in vital upgrades to Australia’s public hospitals: building new wards with more beds, upgrading emergency departments and theatres, and establishing new palliative care and mental health facilities.

This investment blitz – one element of Labor’s $2.8 billion Better Hospitals Fund – is a key part of Labor’s Fair Go Action Plan to improve health care and strengthen Medicare.

We can afford to spend more on health care because we’ve made the tough decisions to make multinationals pay their fair share and close unfair tax loopholes.

In contrast, Scott Morrison and the Liberals have inflicted cut after cut on our health system. That’s why Australians are paying more than ever to see the doctor, and why people are languishing longer than ever in emergency departments and on elective surgery waiting lists.

Only Graham Perrett and Labor can be trusted to fix our hospitals and deliver a new $23.7 million Specialist Care Centre at QEII Hospital.