Mental Health

This bill makes a range of changes across five health-related Acts to improve healthcare access, strengthen patient safety, and update health legislation. Key reforms include allowing nurses and midwives to perform early medical terminations of pregnancy, counting newborns as separate patients for maternity ward staffing ratios, and enabling better sharing of patient safety information across Queensland Health.

This bill extended Queensland's COVID-19 emergency powers from their original expiry in late 2020 and early 2021 until 30 September 2021. It maintained the Chief Health Officer's ability to issue public health directions, continued hotel quarantine cost recovery, and preserved emergency provisions in the Mental Health Act to allow mental health patients to comply with health directions.

This bill amends eight health-related Acts to improve Queensland's health system. It strengthens protections for public health workers, modernises the Queensland Cancer Register to collect better data on cancer diagnosis and treatment, enables schools to share information with the children's vision screening program, and simplifies organ donation consent in private hospitals.

This bill makes wide-ranging amendments across Queensland's health laws to embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health equity, ban conversion therapy by health service providers, strengthen collaboration across the public health system, and update private hospital accreditation requirements. It also repeals the redundant Pap Smear Register and makes administrative changes to the Queensland Mental Health Commission.

This bill creates a portable long service leave scheme for Queensland's community services industry, covering workers in areas like disability support, family violence, homelessness, counselling and youth justice. It allows workers to accumulate long service leave credits as they move between employers in the sector, addressing the high job mobility caused by short-term funding contracts. The bill also fixes an anomaly where employees dismissed due to illness were denied pro rata long service leave.

This bill makes changes across five health-related areas: strengthening Queensland's pharmacy ownership licensing rules before they fully commence, moving occupational lung disease reporting from a state register to a national one, improving mosquito monitoring for Japanese Encephalitis Virus, clarifying how an Acting Mental Health Commissioner can be appointed, and fixing a drafting error about who can dispose of radioactive material.

This bill implements a range of revenue measures from the 2021-22 and 2022-23 Queensland State Budgets. It introduces a new mental health levy on large employers, reforms land tax to account for interstate property holdings, increases coal royalty rates during periods of high prices, and provides tax relief for small businesses, apprentice employers, and retirement visa holders.

This bill modernises Queensland's search and inspection laws to recognise trans and gender diverse people, replacing outdated same-sex rules with gender-responsive safeguards across police, corrections, mental health and public health legislation. It also restricts how often prisoners can reapply for parole after being refused and expands the health professionals who can assess prisoners at risk of self-harm.

This bill creates a Queensland law to allow the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture to visit and inspect all places of detention in the state. It implements Australia's commitments under the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT), ratified in 2017, by giving UN inspectors access to prisons, youth detention centres, mental health facilities, the forensic disability service, police watch-houses, court cells, and prisoner transport vehicles.

This bill makes wide-ranging amendments to Queensland's health legislation, with the most significant reforms to the Mental Health Act 2016. It strengthens the rights of people receiving mental health treatment by replacing 'best interests' tests with a rights-based approach, improves safeguards around electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), enables international patient transfers, and aligns confidentiality provisions across health agencies.