Queensland is currently facing challenges in maintaining adequate maternity services throughout the state, as more women are relying on public hospitals to give birth. Queensland Health has cited challenges in maintaining an adequate workforce to ensure that maternity units in regional areas receive the necessary resources.

Adding to the situation, the private hospital in Cairns will close its maternity unit on 1 November 2023, due to a decline in the number of births in the private sector. 

Following that announcement, a team of Cairns-based private obstetricians have offered their services to support the public sector if they are able to deliver their private patients in the public hospital after 1 November.

The clinicians already assist with maternity services in Townsville and Thursday Island, ensuring these facilities do not have to go into maternity bypass.

However, the Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service has not agreed to the same arrangements. They have declined to permit private specialists to deliver their patients at Cairns Hospital or accept their broader support.

Instead, the hospital bureaucrats will continue to rely on expensive fly-in, fly-out locum services, risking the possibility that Cairns Hospital will be unable to provide adequate maternity services when it must manage all the previously private patients in addition to its current patient load.

The National Association of Specialist Obstetricians and Gynecologists (NASOG) urges you show your support for good maternity care by demanding that Minister Fentiman intervenes and allows obstetricians in private practice to contribute to genuinely improving maternity services for the women of Far North Queensland.