The Queensland Government has been fined $1,000 after the department of health was found to have been using false information in the past.
Key points:The nursing home in Brisbane’s north-east was fined $50,000 for using misleading information to advertise their facilitiesThe State Health Service was also fined $20,000The nursing service is part of a larger company which owns a large number of nursing homesThe nursing company was fined by the State Health Services (SHS) for falsely advertising their nursing home as a family care home in the State.
The Queensland Health Services and the nursing home had been told the nursing service’s properties were family care homes in a bid to sell property to the public.
“They’ve had no communication with the community or with the local community at all, so they were misleading the community,” Acting Chief Health Officer Michael Kelly said.
“The fact that they were advertising the properties as family care centres, they weren’t telling people the reality.”
The SHS and the Brisbane City Health Board jointly fined the nursing facility $50 and $20 each for the deception.
“This is a very serious offence,” Mr Kelly said, adding the offending involved a breach of the Health Services Act.
“If the breaches were not significant enough to warrant an immediate enforcement action, the SHS would not have acted in the first place.”‘
They should have taken a lesson from the NSW State Government’The offending occurred at a time when Queensland’s health services were struggling financially.
“We are in the midst of an unprecedented financial crisis, which has seen our hospital and nursing homes run out of money and have been forced to make difficult decisions about where to locate and the services they will provide,” Mr Kennedy said.
He said it was disappointing that the nursing homes were using the same deceptive information in their advertising.
“It’s a clear case of breach of confidence, but the fact that we’re paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for it does seem like a slap in the face to the community, to the SNSW,” he said.
Mr Kennedy said the offending highlighted the need for the state to enforce the Health Service Act.
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