Premier Campbell Newman and Health Minister Lawrence Springborg attended the Prince Charles Hospital's 60th birthday celebrations on Sunday ahead of the Bundaberg community cabinet to spruik the figures.

Mr Newman said in the last two and a half years Queensland had "gone from one of the worst performing health services in the nation to arguably one of the best" and he expected that by December the number of long-wait surgery patients on the wait list would be zero.

Mr Springborg said that the long wait list for elective surgery had been reduced from 6485 patients in March 2012 to 531 in the September quarter.

He said more than 3500 semi urgent or Category two long wait list patients had also been treated since the government had come to power, a 90 per cent reduction.

Mr Springborg said the government had given health workers the "flexibility" and "support" to get their job done.

"We very clearly believe in unleashing people's potential," he said.

"We believe that we will be the first state government in Australia to lead to the virtual elimination of long-wait surgical patients.

"They are patients that are ready for care that are ready to receive their surgery, because they are able to do that on the advice of their clinician.

"If you look here at the Prince Charles hospital, there has been a virtual elimination of their long-wait surgical patients already and indeed, across Metro-North it has been quite extraordinary what has happened there over the last two-and-a-half years.

"This is about the patients.  This is about making sure that when people are assessed as needing surgery they actually have the surgery within the recommended time.

"It is important to the patient, it is important to their family and it is important to the government that they receive their surgery on time."

But Opposition MP Anthony Lynham said the government was ignoring a critical aspect.

He said there were 400,000 people, "nearly three times the population of Townsville, just waiting to get onto a waiting list".

"If you want to make a waiting list go away, the first thing you do is stop anyone from getting on to the waiting list and that's the first thing they did," Dr Lynham said.

"The second thing you do and the most foolish thing you do is reduce the waiting list by the most expensive method possible.

"So you take people off the waiting list by filing them through the private hospitals, private surgeons and you reduce the waiting list by the most expensive way possible."

Dr Lynham said the government had created a "tsunami" just waiting to break.

"They have worse than fudged it.  They have actually blown the money. The money for reducing the waiting list came from the National Partnership Program.  It ceases and not only will health funding decrease by another $30 billion," Dr Lynham said.

"So now, instead of using the money to build more hospitals, more infrastructure, they've blown it so now when those 400,000 (patients) start to funnel through our hospitals, we haven't got the resources to cope."

But Mr Newman said the government had provided the health system with the support and resources it needed to flourish.

"The health budget is $2 billion a year more.  There are more staff in Queensland Health today, more doctors, more support workers," he said.

"We are recruiting young nurses as well now and we are undertaking a lot of reform in terms of the way operations are done," he said.

"Each hospital and each health service is now looking at ways they can get efficiencies into the system.

"There was a heck of lot of waste and inefficiency in the way business was being done.

"Once the focus has gone in from a local level about doing a better job the teams that are in here have actually been empowered to make it happen."

A spokeswoman for the government said the 411,000 figure quoted by the Opposition was misleading as it included people who had had their initial specialist appointment but did not necessarily need surgery.

She said the number of people waiting to go on the waiting list was 250,000.