Page 5218 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 27 October 2010
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This manager will integrate the services of these organisations with the co-op’s services. Thus the synergies between the two groups and ultimately the service provided to the community will be enhanced. Another important link the co-op has established is with the medicine and health faculties of the ANU and the University of Canberra. This link provides training opportunities for students at those institutions, thus contributing to building future capacity in those professions.
The west Belconnen experience is not the only one, although health cooperatives of this sort are few and far between. The co-op drew some of its inspiration from a cooperative model operating in Melbourne’s western suburbs. The South Kingsville health services cooperative was expanded from one GP in 1980 to over 20 staff today. It provides services which include GP care, dentistry, acupuncture and naturopathy.
The cooperative has grown to 7,600 members and provides around 25,000 consultations per year. The service has an annual turnover of around $2 million. In the ACT with 5,400 members in less than 12 months and a rapidly growing operation, the west Belconnen health cooperative is certainly well on the way to emulating the success of the community-based service that it modelled itself on in Melbourne’s west. All of these achievements that I have spoken about have come to fruition in this year alone.
It shows the value and effectiveness of the co-op’s good and thorough planning over the prior five years. Indeed, these achievements put the efforts of the ACT government to shame. In its nine years in office this government has not been able to ease the GP shortage in Canberra. It has not been able to achieve a higher level of bulk billing and it has allowed community health services to contract.
We even had the government saying that the west Belconnen model is not something which the government should get involved in. It is easy to see just what can be achieved when a community puts its mind to it despite and in spite of government scepticism and eventually having to drag the government kicking and screaming to the funding table. Let us not dwell on what this government might have been but rather let us dwell on what this government could do in the future.
There is without a doubt much to be learned from the model developed and established by the West Belconnen Health Co-op. My motion today calls on the government to explore the opportunities to replicate that community-based model in other parts of Canberra where GP and bulk-billing services are inadequate, particularly in Tuggeranong and in Gungahlin.
Indeed, Mr Speaker, the Canberra Liberals recognised the need for this in 2008. When we made a commitment in 2008 for an extra $300,000 funding for the west Belconnen health cooperative, $100,000 of that was to study the opportunities to establish similar models in other areas of bulk-billing shortage in Canberra and to help establish those centres.
The co-op has already established the model for that research. A steering group of the health cooperative, the Charnwood Community Health Committee, surveyed 8,000
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