Attributable to Member for Mildura, Ali Cupper:
The recent announcement that Tristar Medical Group’s Mildura Clinic is to close permanently is alarming and disappointing.
I understand the concern and fear that this is causing for Tristar patients and the wider community.
I have been in touch with the Murray Primary Health Network (the Federal body responsible for supporting primary health care in our region) and have offered my support for the activities that they are undertaking to address the issue. If they require assistance from the Victorian Government, I will go into bat for them.
The Federal Government are responsible for the provision of GP services through Medicare.
Medicare has been neglected for over 10 years by the Liberals and Nationals in Federal Government.
Medicare Rebates have not kept up with the costs of delivering General Practice services.
In addition, the feds haven’t trained enough new GPs, they also haven’t offered them any incentive to come to the rural areas, and they aren’t making General Practice an attractive career choice.
Over many years we became reliant on Overseas Trained Doctors, who have become a valued backbone of our primary care sector, but the closure of our international borders saw that tap turned off.
The result is a drastic shortage of GPs, and clinics that cannot afford to bulk bill patients.
So where do the people go when they can’t get into a GP? They go to the hospital.
That leads to longer waiting times and a huge backlog of people in the emergency department. People who could have been seen elsewhere. This was a problem even before Tristar closed, and the closure will only make it worse.
Despite this being a Federal Government issue, there are some projects that I’m working on at the state level to try to ease the burden on our struggling GPs and health services. They are:
• Community Paramedics: working with state funded health services like Sunraysia Community Health Services, Mallee Track Health and Community Services, Robinvale District Health Services and Ambulance Victoria on enhanced paramedic models, which sees paramedics offering frontline primary health care services in community
• Nurse Practitioners: Lobbying the Victorian Government to create and promote identified roles for Nurse Practitioners, highly trained nurses who are equipped to deliver frontline primary health care and who can have a place in our state’s health care system
• Pharmacists in General Practice: Working with the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia to support embedding pharmacists into local General Practices to support GPs in the prescription of medication
While the three projects above are innovative ways to ease some of the burden on our busy GPs, they aren’t a replacement for GPs. Only the Federal Government can fix that.
With that in mind, I am requesting a meeting with the Federal Health Minister, the Hon Mark Butler. If I’m successful in securing a meeting, I will be asking him for the following:
• To support the Primary Health Network and other interested stakeholders to provide interim pop-up clinical support for patients affected by the closure of Tristar Medical Group.
• To fund the implementation of a Rural Areas Community Controlled Health Organisation (RACCHO) in Mildura in partnership with local stakeholders, as defined by the National Rural Health Alliance.
• To implement a subsidy, similar to the one recently announced by the Victorian Government, to subsidise the cost of undergraduate and postgraduate studies and vocational training for medical graduates who commit to specialising in General Practice and working in a rural or remote area when they graduate.
• To double the amount of funding provided to the Rural Health Multidisciplinary Training program that is delivered by Universities in rural and regional Australia, along with strengthening the requirements of the program to focus on high quality, place based, in-service learning and student retention rather than throughput.
• To review and increase the Practice Incentives Program Rural Loading Incentive to reflect the urgent need to increase sustainability of rural and remote General Practice
I will keep the community informed of progress in these matters.