Page 3579 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 26 August 2008
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In relation to Mrs Burke’s outrageous attack on the representation of the medical board, she referred about three times to the slackness of the medical board to act in a timely way. I would hope that she would retract those comments. The medical board is an extremely eminent group of health professionals in the ACT who work very hard, in addition to their already quite considerable workloads, to make sure that issues affecting medical practitioners are dealt with in a fair, balanced and timely way. For Mrs Burke to continue to call them slack, to say that they failed to convene a meeting or a committee and that they sat on their hands for weeks on end, which is what she just said in here, calls into question the reputation of all of those medical professionals on the Medical Board of the ACT. I look forward to Mrs Burke apologising to those professionals and taking back those comments which she has made around them.
It was also interesting to see that Mrs Burke, for the first time, has admitted that she probably will not be re-elected, because she said that if she is not re-elected she will leave it to someone else to finish this very important work. Again, that is quite a surprising comment from someone who potentially wants to run the public health system here.
We have been accused of being knee-jerk in our response to this issue, and I totally reject that. The government have been responsible in every aspect of how we have dealt with the closure of the Wanniassa medical centre, including being honest around the impact that we can have in intervening in these decisions. Our response has been to look to accept the decision of Primary Health Care, even though we do not agree with it, but also accept that Primary Health Care are now providing a very much needed service to the people of the ACT. In fact, I think from the latest data I have seen, around 20 per cent of our population is moving through one or either of those clinics. They do offer a bulk-billing service, and they do offer extended hours. So we cannot just sit here and insinuate that corporatisation is the end of good medical practice, because, in fact, it is not. It is a different type of medical practice, but you cannot just say that, because it is run by a corporation, it is not as good as any other type. In fact, for many people, it is exactly what they are after.
I also note that Dr Bateman has written to Mrs Burke, and he has copied me in on the letter, to respond to some of the concerns that she has raised. He cc’d me on the letter because it goes to some of the issues that I have raised with him. He does go to the fact that many of the problems in relation to general practice have been around for some time. In fact, he says:
There has been a long-term underfunding of general practice, especially in the last two decades of the Federal Liberal Government. An example is a 2% increase in GP rebates in November 2008, versus costs of practices increasing 10%.
He goes on to say:
There has been a deliberate Liberal Government policy to reduce numbers of General Practitioners through a variety of mechanisms, including:
Reduced number of training positions for GPs
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