Colour me skeptical
AUSTRALIA’S doctor shortage has reached crisis point, with three-quarters of the country’s land area, and more than 12 million people, now deemed as lacking adequate access to primary care.
Nowhere in the article is adequate access to primary care defined and as Abbott says, and it’s not unreasonable, the figures were based on a “statistical construct”
I’m not suggesting there isn’t a problem but more than half the country lacking adequate access to primary care – I doubt it.
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Kev
There’s a problem, all right, but I’ve seen nothing in either party’s policies that will fix it. I work with kids with physical impairments in SW Qld as far west as Quilpie. The parents of these kids have a tough time even accessing the basics. Trying to get specialist pediatric support for them is almost impossible. Without Angelflight they’d be stuffed.
They pay the same taxes as everyone else.
From where I sit – which is more in the Allied Health area – the issue is the recruitment of staff and then supporting them to stay in the bush. Typically, the young ones burn out quick smart, as they don’t really get the mentoring they need. They’re also legally vulnerable given the growth of the plaintiff lawyer industry. My district has had a vacancy for a Physio on and off for five years.
My youngest brother was a bush GP for ten years, and it nearly killed him. He now practices in the city, and has a life.
The last statement in the article may hold a clue –
“It’s going to fall down, because where’s the workforce going to come from to run the GP clinics?” said Dr Hughes.
“School-leavers can go and earn $1500 a week cleaning at the mines – why would they go to uni collecting HECS debts to learn professions that are going to earn them $42,000 a year after graduation?”
Maybe cutting HECS for medical students might go some way towards solving the problem – and then attaching that to an obligation to serve – say five years – in a remote or rural setting. It used to work for teachers. The scheme cut out about twenty years, and filling bush school vacancies has been tough ever since.
Putting up new clinics (which both the ALP and the Coalition advocate) will be a waste of time. There are heaps of bush hospitals out there now – with lots of state of the art equipment, and no staff to operate them.
IIRC back in the 80’s a character called Blewitt was worried about the rise in Health costs largely caused by his expansion of the administration. So he came up with a solution – cut he number of medical students.
One of the reasons for the decline in rural medical services is the relentless searching (by both parties) for someone to blame. It’s pointless. This issue is one of the most thoroughly researched topics out there, and most of the studies simply recommend more research. There is a simple and radical solution – in Queensland at least – make Longreach the state capital. This would force all the decision makers (particularly the ministerial advisers who are the real power in the land) to live in the bush. The quality of decision making would change overnight as these people and their families began to rely on local medical services for a decent quality of life.
From a letter in todays Oz
The World Health Organisation predicts a 4.3 million deficit in health workers over the next decade so we need to be smarter than just taking doctors from other countries.
First, we need to create other types of health workers who can screen and treat patients as part of the healthcare team and fund them appropriately.
Maybe he’s right. We do need to look at the system overall.
I suspect the labor governments around the country have set up huge bureaucracies of public servants at the expense of actual health workers. An acquaintance was appointed Deputy Commissioner on the initial Patel inquiry and offered a staff of 900 to do the job. What were these 900 doing that they could be so quickly transferred?
Aren’t there any young inspiring medicos that see their life’s work as making a difference in such small and remote communities?
And I still don’t believe that 12 million Aussies can’t get good primary care. It is a beat up at a politically appropriate time.