Stolen Identities, Duplicate Records: Townsville Residents Speak Out on Queensland Health's Image Replacement CrisisUpdated

Patients at Townsville University Hospital and outlying community health clinics have reported receiving medical imaging linked to the wrong person — a consequence of duplicate record entries that Queensland Health has been working to resolve since at least early 2025. The problem surfaces when two patient profiles are created for the same individual, or when images are attached to an incorrect file during busy intake periods, leaving clinicians to work with scans that may belong to someone else entirely.

The issue has moved from an administrative inconvenience to a live patient safety concern, particularly in a city where tens of thousands of people depend on a single major hospital — the Townsville University Hospital on Angus Smith Drive — as their primary referral centre for everything from oncology to orthopaedic surgery.

What Community Members Are Experiencing

Residents in Cranbrook, Kirwan and the Aitkenvale corridor have described scenarios where appointments were delayed because imaging staff flagged a mismatch between a scan result and the patient's recorded medical history. One woman from Thuringowa Central said she waited an additional three weeks for a chest CT result to be verified after her file showed imaging from a different patient's procedure date. She is not a named source in any official complaint, but her account is consistent with what patient advocates at the Townsville Community Legal Service on Sturt Street have begun documenting informally since January 2026.

For Townsville's Pacific Islander community — concentrated in suburbs including Heatley and Garbutt — the complication carries an extra layer of difficulty. Community health workers linked to programs operating out of the Townsville Aboriginal and Islander Health Service say that patients who already face language barriers or distrust of bureaucratic systems are less likely to flag a records error, meaning a duplicate image problem can go undetected across multiple appointments.

First Nations patients navigating the treaty consultation process and the associated health service reviews have raised records accuracy as a concern in community sessions held through 2025. When a scan doesn't match a name, the downstream effect can include a wrong-dosage recommendation or a missed follow-up referral — outcomes that disproportionately affect patients who have fewer private options to fall back on.

Scale of the Problem and What the System Is Doing

Queensland Health's Patient Administration System has been the subject of ongoing remediation work, with the state government allocating funds through the 2025–26 budget to address interoperability issues across its hospital network. Nationally, the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has identified patient misidentification as one of the top contributors to preventable adverse events, noting in its 2023 annual report that mismatched records affect an estimated one in every 1,000 hospital admissions across Australian public hospitals — a figure that scales to hundreds of cases annually in a city the size of Townsville, which services a catchment population of roughly 250,000 people across North Queensland.

Townsville University Hospital operates a Medical Records Integrity team that is responsible for merging duplicate patient identifiers. However, community health workers say the team's workload has grown alongside the hospital's expansion, and that imaging departments — radiology in particular — are flagging mismatches faster than the administrative queue can clear them. The hospital has not publicly released figures on how many duplicate image cases were identified in the 2025 calendar year.

Advocates are urging patients who suspect a records error to request a Patient Liaison Officer appointment directly through the hospital's main switchboard on Angus Smith Drive, and to bring two forms of identification to every imaging appointment. The Townsville Community Legal Service has published a plain-language fact sheet on medical records rights under the Information Privacy Act 2009 (Qld), available from its Sturt Street office. Patients with concerns about a delayed or potentially mismatched result can also lodge a formal complaint with the Office of the Health Ombudsman, which operates a Queensland-wide intake line and has a Townsville-region caseload that has grown each year since 2022. Getting a record corrected before a critical procedure, advocates say, is far easier than untangling a clinical decision made on wrong information.