April 1, 2016: MEMBER for Mackay Julieanne Gilbert has been found guilty of unnecessarily scaring doctors and nurses about job losses following today’s COAG decision on hospital funding.Ms Gilbert wanted to pre-empt the outcome of today’s Council of Australian Governments meeting and proclaim that Mackay was in danger of losing 32 doctors and 113 nurses.There was never a danger that jobs would be cut.It was the size of the increase that was in dispute.The Prime Minister put an offer on the table today regarding further funding and the Queensland Premier confirmed that she is happy to receive an additional $445 million for health and hospitals.I said on Wednesday that Ms Gilbert needed to wait for the outcome of the COAG meeting and we now see that her scaremongering was simply that.Leaders agreed to a Heads of Agreement for public hospitals funding from 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2020 ahead of consideration of longer-term arrangements.This will see the Commonwealth providing an estimated additional $2.9 billion in funding for public hospital services, with growth in Commonwealth funding capped at 6.5 per cent a year.As part of this Agreement, all jurisdictions agreed to take action to improve the quality of care in hospitals, by:

• reducing demand for hospital services through better coordinated care for people with chronic disease;
• and reducing the number of avoidable hospital readmissions – distressingly, for too many patients, they are readmitted to hospitals as a result of complications arising from their original condition.