An audit of how the Department of Health and Hospital and Health Services work together has found that further action needs to be taken to ensure effective planning for sustainable health services.
Auditor-General, Brendan Worrall said the separate parts of the health system could work better on long-term plans and short-term initiatives.
“The Hospital and Health Services (HHSs) have been established as independent entities, but they are dependent upon the Department for most of their funding and staff,” Mr Worrall said.
“They can achieve more if they work across boundaries when planning how to best meet Queenslanders’ needs.”
He said effective planning was hampered by the lack of a consistent understanding of what a sustainable health system was and how the State-wide and local-level priorities complemented each other.
“Queensland Health generally consults well with its clinicians and communities when planning, but there is a lack of a consistent approach on how, with whom, and when it takes place,” Mr Worrall said.
He noted that in 2016, Queensland Health designed My Health, Queensland’s Future: Advancing Health 2026 as a 10-year strategy to guide the Government’s long-term investment in health.
“It does not have a clear implementation roadmap of how its health service plans and enabling plans (for example, workforce plans) contribute to achieving the objectives in this strategy,” the Auditor-General said.
“Workforce plans are not in place for all critical roles. For example, Queensland Health does not have a State-wide nursing workforce plan but is in the process of preparing one.”
He said the HHSs had only recently started to strategically plan for their future workforce needs.
“The Department has not developed State-wide plans for all services that have a large number of patients. Without these plans, there is a risk that planning by the HHSs will be fragmented,” Mr Worrall said.
“Queensland Health has a growing and ageing asset base. It has identified that it will need significant further investment to renew these assets and acquire new ones.
“However, it needs to improve its approach to decide the relative priority of future investments.”
The audit made seven recommendations for Queensland Health to improve integrated planning, the capacity and capability of staff, priority setting, and evaluating a plan’s success.
Mr Worrall said many of the issues raised in the audit were now being addressed.
The Auditor-General’s 53-page report Planning for sustainable health services can be accessed at this PS News link.
