Page 1314 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2009
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If we look at the health system in its entirety, we can see that if we do not get enough GPs we are going to have an increased burden on our already failing emergency departments and elective surgery rates. Despite this, I think, well understood and well-known requirement for GPs in our community, if we actually look at the government’s record we see very little action that has been taken in this regard. In fact, the minister pleads that it is not her problem. She fails to take responsibility for this. She essentially blames the federal government for not having done enough. If it is not the federal government then it is the healthcare providers themselves.
Last week, when the Kippax family centre closed, the health minister said, “All we can do is, I guess, seek the corporate goodwill of some of these providers.” If the minister’s response to the closure of yet another family GP clinic is to say that all we can do is to seek the corporate goodwill then that is not enough. There is nothing to stop this minister lobbying her federal colleagues to seek assistance in this regard. After the 2007 federal election we got a commitment to the end of the blame game; the blame game was over. I see little evidence of that. Already this minister has said that she has written to her federal colleagues and sought support to get additional programs, but that her federal colleagues will not even acknowledge that we have a GP shortage in the ACT. They say that we do not have a GP shortage here.
What are we missing out on? What other programs are we missing out on? What initiatives are we missing out on? Under the district of workforce shortage initiative of the commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing, international medical graduates can get essentially waivers so that they can, not shortcut, but circumvent some of the process to get registered. There is the commonwealth’s Australian general practice training program, prevocational general practice placements program and the general practice after-hours program. The minister has simply failed in her approach to the federal government. She is continuing to play the blame game.
I wonder why that is. Is the minister just incapable of mounting the argument adequately or is it that we in the ACT are being treated with disdain? The federal Labor government know that they have got a couple of safe seats here and the Stanhope-Gallagher government has been re-elected here for four years. “Why should we bother?” seems to be the attitude. Certainly, the minister has been unable to convince her federal colleagues that we do have a shortage here.
There is nothing to stop the development of new ideas. I think there is a lot more that could be done. At the last election we took forward a raft of policies that would have gone a significant way towards increasing the number of GPs here in the community. There were some recommendations made after the Wanniassa medical centre closed, but the government is yet to respond to that. There is a lot more that could be done by this government that is not being done.
We had a policy of free bulk-billing GP clinics for the suburbs, including Belconnen. It was scoffed at by the government during the election campaign. We pledged support for the community health centre that has yet to be opened at Belconnen. We said that we would support it with all the funding that it required—the $200,000 plus another $200,000. It would be open by now if that had been supported by the
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