Page 3310 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 20 August 2008
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Mrs Burke also went on about red tape and how hard it is to recruit an overseas doctor to come and work here. Yes, it is hard—and for good reason. Any discussion with the ACT medical board will indicate exactly why it is hard to come through—that is, to ensure that patient safety is right at the forefront of any decisions about doctors coming to work here with qualifications from an overseas university. There are absolutely good reasons for why this operates. I do not know whether Mrs Burke has had the opportunity to discuss this with any medical practitioner or a member of the medical board, but they will go through in fine detail exactly why the red tape exists. In fact, the position that we have funded at the Division of General Practice to recruit and market the ACT as a place to come and work is specifically looking at that issue with the medical board, to look at whether there is capacity to reduce some of the red tape, but starting from the point that the red tape is always going to be there because of the need to protect and focus on patient safety and on the quality of the medical practitioners who may come and work here.
The issue of general practice is even more serious because if you are recruiting an overseas doctor to come and work in a hospital, there are much clearer supervision arrangements, it is very public, they usually work in a workforce around many people in a hierarchy and under a supervision regime. The issue with general practice—and I have spoken about this at length with the medical board—is that you work behind closed doors without supervision. So they want to be doubly sure that you are a high-quality doctor who can be entrusted with that kind of work.
Without knowledge of the background, and coming from overseas, they want to check out where you worked and who you worked with, they want you to sit exams, they want you to go through training, to make sure that when you do have your first consultation with a patient, you are a safe and high-quality practitioner who can undertake that appointment. The ACT government does not apologise for that at all. Many other jurisdictions which have not had that stringent regulation are now putting this in place. They have suffered because of that lack of process when they have needed to recruit overseas doctors.
The ACT government needs to focus its energies on the public health system. That is where the demand is; that is where the demand is growing. We need to support our general practitioners. We need to work with them, and certainly the ACT government has done so. We employ GP liaison officers in ACT Health. We have funded the program with the Division of General Practice. With respect to that program, they came to us and said, “We’d like to run this,” and so we were responding to them. We set up the Canberra After-hours Locum Medical Service. As Rashmi Sharma pointed out yesterday, everyone supports that service. All the stakeholders and the government support that, and it has provided a much-needed service.
We have established the nurse practitioner roles. We are working on the walk-in centres which we need to get up and running, particularly in Tuggeranong. We convened the GP Workforce Working Group, where stakeholders gather to talk about our local shortage of GPs. We have budgeted for a pre-vocational general practice placements program. These are the practical things that make a difference for the general practitioner workforce, while keeping the lines clear about who does what. As a government, we also do not apologise that our focus is very much on making sure
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