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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 10 Hansard (24 September) . . Page.. 3599 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

them establish a practice in outer metropolitan areas of Canberra, as long as they agree to stay here for at least three years. Under this scheme, the ACT will also get more GP trainees, who will be able, after completion of their training, to practise as independent general practitioners in Canberra. The Commonwealth has also agreed to designate the ACT as a "district of workforce shortage for GP services". This will make it easier for established GPs to recruit doctors to fill vacancies in their practices by allowing them to recruit qualified but overseas trained doctors who would not previously have been able to practise as GPs in Canberra.

Members here have heard me speak about GP shortages in Tuggeranong in the past. I pay some compliment to Rosemary Lissimore, the chair of the Tuggeranong Community Council, for continually pushing the issue-and I say that quite sincerely. One of the difficulties the southern end of Tuggeranong has experienced has been that, if they found a doctor who was overseas trained, that person could not set up practice here. So what happened was that they were lost to interstate, to centres like Albury, Dubbo, Orange and places like that with the benefit of an outer metropolitan area status.

I am absolutely thrilled to pieces about the incentive scheme, knowing as I do the plight of the about 15,000 people in the Lanyon Valley part of Tuggeranong, a quite clearly defined catchment area with only one GP practice that has had closed books for five years. People there have had to travel quite extensive distances to see a doctor. I am hoping that these sorts of incentives will entice GPs down to that part of Tuggeranong.

I am particularly pleased that the minister was able to secure agreement from the Commonwealth to fund a new model of after-hours GP services. I understand that the new model will be developed with the ACT government, the ACT Division of General Practice and the Canberra After Hours Locum Medical Service, CALMS. Members would be aware that the ACT government has already shown its commitment to after-hours GP services in the ACT by providing $700,000 over two years to support the Canberra After Hours Locum Medical Service.

The Commonwealth has also agreed to use funding available under the health care agreement for the capital costs of the ACT's planned sub and non-acute facility, saving the ACT $5.5 million to invest elsewhere. This sub and non-acute facility will provide improved rehabilitation services and better care for older people who require hospital care for mental illness. Members in this place will recall the fondness I have for the rehabilitation services of the hospital. Any extra resources that can go to that I am sure will be appreciated. I am sure it will also be appreciated by a former chief minister of this place who is about to receive those services-and high-quality services they are too.

The final major concession that the minister won from the Commonwealth was funding for 50 approved but not yet operational nursing home beds to provide transitional care beds for people who are waiting in hospital for a nursing home place. Currently there is up to a two-year delay between nursing home places being approved by the Commonwealth and their coming on line. I imagine that that means that people are in a hospital bed for that period of time, and that is not only a supremely costly way of providing nursing home beds-even though they are regarded as nursing home-type patients, it is a mistake to believe that they are fully costed-but the most inappropriate place for somebody to spend their declining years. There is in a hospital, by definition, a thing called the "sick syndrome"; you are surrounded by sick people. Folks who should

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