Just before 9pm on a Thursday in mid-2025, a Queensland Ambulance Service crew backed into the ramp outside Ipswich Hospital's emergency department with an 84-year-old woman who had fallen at home and could not stand. There was no bed free inside. For close to two hours she stayed on the ambulance stretcher in the corridor, connected to the crew's own monitor, while the two paramedics who had brought her in waited beside her because handover to hospital staff had not happened and they could not leave for the next call. Only once a bed cleared further down the ward could the crew log off and go back on the road. Scenes like this one played out, on average, on roughly four in every ten ambulance arrivals at Queensland hospitals through the final quarter of 2025 — an improvement on the year before, but still a routine feature of the system, not an exception to it (Queensland Ambulance Service performance data, Dec-2025 quarter).
Ambulance ramping — paramedics holding patients on stretchers, sometimes for hours, because no emergency department bed is free to accept them — was the defining domestic issue of Queensland's October 2024 election. Then-Opposition Leader David Crisafulli built much of his campaign around it, and Labor, in power since 2015, could not shake the record of a system that had visibly deteriorated on its watch. The LNP won government promising to fix ramping within a term. About eighteen months later, with its own funding committed and its own quarterly figures published, that promise is now a record it can be checked against, using its own data rather than the campaign rhetoric that won it office.
What Labor did, and why it lost office over it
Labor's principal response to rising demand, from 2019 onward, was the $377 million Satellite Hospital program: seven purpose-built clinics at Tugun, Redlands, Eight Mile Plains, Bribie Island, Caboolture, Kallangur and Ripley, offering walk-in urgent care for minor injuries and illness without the full resuscitation and inpatient capacity of a hospital emergency department. The program delivered genuine relief for low-acuity presentations — more than 28,000 Queenslanders had used the clinics within the first months of the rollout. It did not reverse the underlying trend. Queensland Health missed its own statewide ambulance ramping target for nine consecutive years to 2023-24, and the share of patients handed over to an emergency department within the target 30 minutes fell from 73.2 per cent in 2019-20 to 55.6 per cent in 2023-24, a 17.6 percentage-point deterioration over the same period the satellite hospital program was Labor's flagship health infrastructure response (Queensland Audit Office, Health 2024, Jan-2025; approx. figures as reported via the AMA Ambulance Ramping Report Card 2025).
What the LNP promised, and what it has funded
In opposition, the LNP campaigned on a $590 million Easier Access to Health Services Plan, pledging to cut ramping by 30 per cent within its first term. In government since late October 2024, it folded that commitment into a larger $18.5 billion Hospital Rescue Plan, funding more than 2,600 additional hospital beds, three new hospitals at Toowoomba, Coomera and Bundaberg, and ten major hospital expansions, sitting inside a record $33.1 billion health budget for 2025-26. Within that package, roughly $1.7 billion is earmarked specifically for reducing ambulance ramping through more paramedics and faster emergency department triage, alongside a separate $1 billion Queensland Ambulance Service package funding more than 600 new paramedics, 300 support workers and new stations at Beenleigh Central and Southport East. The government's own published target is to bring statewide ramping below 30 per cent by October 2028 — the end of its first term (Queensland Budget 2025-26 and 2026-27, Service Delivery Statements — Queensland Health).
The strongest case
No government controls how many people move to Queensland
Put the government's defence at its strongest, because parts of it are demographic fact. Queensland is the only state or territory to have recorded positive net interstate migration in every financial year since the early 1980s, and in 2024-25 alone the state added almost 98,000 people — 1.8 per cent growth, above the national average, with migration accounting for 79 per cent of it (Queensland Government Statistician's Office, Population growth highlights and trends, 2025 edition). Every one of those extra residents is a potential emergency department presentation, and a growing share are older Queenslanders who use hospital services more intensively. No hospital building program, however well funded, can be designed, built and staffed inside the same budget cycle that the population grows in; the three new hospitals in the current plan will not open for several years yet.
Nor is ramping unique to Queensland or to one side of politics. Every mainland state has reported worsening ambulance offload times since the pandemic, driven by the same combination of rising presentations, a stretched health workforce, and a shortage of aged care and disability places that leaves medically-ready patients stuck in hospital beds because there is nowhere safe to discharge them to (Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services 2026, Part E: Health). On that reading, a government that moved within its first budget to commit record funding, and that has already pulled the ramping rate down from its 2024 peak, deserves credit for direction and pace this early in its term.
The evidence
None of this needs to be taken on trust. Queensland Health publishes ramping and emergency department data quarterly, the Queensland Audit Office reports on the health system's performance and finances annually, and both records now span the change of government cleanly enough to compare like with like.
The elective surgery data tells a similar two-part story. Queensland's elective surgery waitlist more than doubled over the decade to 2024, from 27,950 patients in February 2015 to 66,232 at the end of that year. Since the change of government, a $1.8 billion four-year commitment and an outsourcing model called Surgery Connect have delivered more than 33,500 procedures since February 2025, cutting the waitlist to 59,393 by March 2026 — roughly 10 per cent lower than a year earlier and the lowest total since November 2023 (Queensland Health, Our Performance dashboards; Queensland Government ministerial statements, Mar-2026). At the Queensland Children's Hospital, the reduction over the same twelve months was 18.3 per cent.
That progress sits against a health system whose finances are under real strain. The Queensland Audit Office's most recent annual report on the sector, tabled in January 2026, recorded a combined deficit across Queensland Health and its 16 Hospital and Health Services of $960.6 million for 2024-25 — the largest such deficit on record — even as the volume of services the system delivered rose by 11.7 per cent. The prior report, tabled in January 2025, found more than 3,500 patients with immediately or imminently life-threatening conditions had presented at satellite hospitals, facilities designed for minor injury and illness rather than full emergency care, and documented ageing clinical infrastructure including an 83-year-old operating theatre at Charleville and Metro South radiation oncology equipment that broke down 32 times in a single year (Queensland Audit Office, Health 2024, Jan-2025, and Health 2025, Jan-2026).
The critique
Two things can be true at once, and the fairness this masthead insists on requires holding both in view. Queensland's population growth is real, national ramping pressure is real, and the Crisafulli government has, on its own published numbers, brought the ramping rate down from a Labor-era peak. But responsibility for the underlying crisis sits overwhelmingly with the government that held office for the nine years the target was missed, not the government that inherited it eighteen months ago. A 17.6 percentage-point deterioration in ambulance handover performance between 2019-20 and 2023-24, alongside a satellite hospital program that Queensland's own auditor found was absorbing thousands of patients too acute for the facility they were sent to, describes a health system whose capacity did not keep pace with either population growth or its own election promises, under a government that had years of notice of the population trend now being cited, fairly, to explain the LNP's own slower-than-hoped progress.
The LNP's early record deserves scrutiny on the same even-handed basis. The ramping rate has fallen from a June 2024 peak of 44.5 per cent to 37.3 per cent in the December 2025 quarter, a real improvement of more than seven percentage points inside about eighteen months in office. But it remains well above the 2019-20 baseline of 26.8 per cent, and roughly seven to eight percentage points above the sub-30-per-cent target the government has set itself for October 2028, with under three years left to close that gap (Queensland Ambulance Service performance data; Queensland Budget 2026-27, Service Delivery Statements). Elective surgery has improved faster and more visibly than ramping, helped by Surgery Connect's reliance on private-sector operating capacity rather than public theatre throughput alone. That is a legitimate and common way to cut a backlog quickly, but it is also a recurring purchasing cost that a budget already running a record health deficit will need to keep funding, not a one-off fix.
A government that inherited a crisis nine years in the making cannot be judged on eighteen months of data alone — but it chose the 2028 deadline itself, and the clock on that promise is now its own.
There is also a structural point the funding announcements do not fully resolve. Ramping is a symptom of bed and workforce capacity across the whole hospital system, not an ambulance-side problem that more paramedics alone can fix — a patient stuck on a ramp is usually waiting for an emergency department bed that is itself occupied by a patient waiting for an inpatient bed, or by a patient medically ready for discharge with nowhere appropriate, such as an aged care place, to go. The Hospital Rescue Plan's beds and new hospitals address part of that chain, but the three flagship hospitals will not open for several years, meaning the government's own 2028 timeline depends on interim measures — more paramedics, faster triage — carrying most of the improvement in the meantime, ahead of the bed capacity the same evidence suggests is still years from arriving (Queensland Audit Office, Health 2024 and Health 2025).
Credit where it's due
Two things about the new government's approach are worth crediting on their own terms. It committed to publishing ramping and emergency department data more often and in more detail from early in its term, a transparency step that makes an audit like this one possible in close to real time rather than waiting for an annual report (Queensland Government, Ministerial Statement, Feb-2025). And it has kept the funding flowing across two consecutive budgets rather than treating one large announcement as the end of the task, with the 2026-27 Service Delivery Statements confirming the ramping and elective surgery programs as ongoing, not one-off, commitments. Whatever judgement is reached on the pace of improvement, that is a different pattern to Labor's final years, when funding announcements repeatedly outpaced the data showing whether they were working.
The risk to the future
A self-set deadline, and a state that keeps growing
The Crisafulli government chose October 2028, the end of its own first term, as the date by which ramping must fall below 30 per cent. That is a politically honest choice, in that it invites exactly the kind of test this masthead exists to run, but it is also a high-stakes one: Labor lost office in 2024 largely because voters judged its handling of the same metric, and a government that sets its own deadline on the issue that unseated its predecessor has handed the next election a ready-made scorecard. Queensland's population is not going to stop growing to make that deadline easier to hit — the state has recorded positive net interstate migration every year since the early 1980s, with no sign in the current data of that trend reversing.
The deeper risk sits in the budget. Queensland Health's combined deficit reached $960.6 million in 2024-25, the largest on record, in the same year that funding for ramping and elective surgery was being scaled up. If the beds behind the Hospital Rescue Plan slip in delivery, as major hospital builds often do, or if the health deficit keeps widening, a future government will face the same choice Labor faced: fund the gap, slow the building program, or watch the ramping rate climb again before the next election arrives to judge it.