Doorstop Interview - Whyalla
With Senator Deborah O’Neill, Labor Senator for New South Wales
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP INTERVIEW
WHYALLA
TUESDAY, 1 MARCH 2022
SUBJECT: Senate inquiry into GP shortages.
KAREN GROGAN, LABOR SENATOR FOR SOUTH AUSTRALIA: Thanks for coming out today - really appreciate it. The Senate’s Community Affairs Committee is in town looking at the issue of GP access in rural and remote areas. It's something that I've been looking at over the last couple of months, as have many of my other colleagues. In this area, the survey I conducted tells us that 84 per cent of people in regional areas in South Australia, are struggling to get an appointment with a GP. There are fundamental structural problems with how our GP program works, and the access that people in our community have to health services. We're hoping today to get some answers out of people about how things are working. We are hearing from a range of our local councils and local health services about the issues they face, and what they believe to be the problems. This is a really, really important inquiry and we hope to, at the end of the day, come out with some significant understanding about how to fix the crisis that we are seeing in our community in terms of access to health services.
JOURNALIST: What kind of submissions have you heard so far? There was a private one with the RACGP (Royal Australian College of General Practitioners) this morning?
GROGAN: Yeah, there's been a big change to how training for GP's is proposed to occur and there's a lot of confusion about how those contracts are going to roll out with the RACGP being one of the key proponents of that taking up about 90 per cent of the contract across Australia.
And we are concerned about how that will impact in rural areas and how that will impact in terms of the kind of support and the depth of training that these doctors are going to get once they move out here. So we'll be really interested to see how that pans out. At the moment there are more questions than there are answers because that's still in that development stage, but we'll be keeping a really close eye on that. Some of the other people that we're hearing from, Streaky Bay Council, Kimba, Goyder, these are all people who are concerned about the number of GP's they're able to attract and keep in the region. Kimba, for example, has only had a GP for two of the past six years and that seriously impacts the health and the continuity of care that we see for our community.
JOURNALIST: Some people in rural Australia say, ‘rural Australia is very used to lacking medical services’. So why is, and then I wonder what is actually the purpose of having these, these inquiries every, every few years is what is there a chance to try to develop something substantially different than what we've seen in the past?
GROGAN: We'd like to hope so. We have seen a lot of changes in the last number of years. Changes to the funding programs, changes to a range of services, and we're not convinced they're working. And to understand how those changes impacted, we need to unpack this. We need to ask the question to find out exactly what's happening on the ground, because it's not translating to better services and the whole intent is for better services in regional areas. There are some broader structural problems, so the varying access to telehealth which we saw an increase in telehealth through COVID and now a lot of that has just been ripped away by the government and also the freeze to Medicare, which has had a serious impact. But my colleague Deb O’Neill, will take you through some of that.
JOURNALIST: How important is it to encourage young doctors to come here, to the regions? Because that's going to be one of the problems isn’t it, because older doctors are retiring and there are younger doctors that might not make the choice to come here because they have a better chance in the cities.
GROGAN: I guess for out in the regional areas, being a local GP is about being an integral part of the community. It's a different experience. It's a different role. It's a vitally important role and I know a number of our long-term GPs out here love the work. Absolutely love it. And I'm really concerned about the new generation coming forward. So yes, we need to be looking to kids in our community to be choosing this pathway, to be getting the training, but to be able to stay where they were brought up, in the place that they love, and build GPs from our own community, not always be looking overseas, or looking to the metropolitan areas to attract GPs, but to actually build our own.
JOURNALIST: Where do you feel, I suppose, the burden of addressing this shortfall really comes from either the State Government or would you say this is going to be something that the Federal Government has responsibility and/or plan for? Where do we, I suppose, attribute responsibility primarily here?
GROGAN: When we're talking about GPs, it's really the Federal Government that is on the hook for this. The Federal Government controls all of the training in that GP world, Medicare, how Medicare structured all of the rebates, all of the access to services, that is all a federal government responsibility. And the Federal Government has done a very, very poor job in the last eight years. We've seen significant declines in that period of time due to some of those policy changes and decisions that the Federal Government has made.
JOURNALIST: This is an election, this is an election year, so I just want to ask, I suppose, considering this has been a problem for both Labor and Liberal governments, what would a Labor government actually have to offer regional Australia in access in terms of access to medical services?
GROGAN: If you're talking federal, those policies will come out of time. We're still a piece away from the federal election, but certainly, we have a deep and abiding concern about how things have got so much worse in the last eight years of a Morrison Federal Government.
DEBORAH O’NEILL, LABOR SENATOR FOR NEW SOUTH WALES: Senator Deborah O'Neill and I'm a Senator for New South Wales and I've been on this committee as we've been inquiring into the reality of what it's actually like to try and get to a GP. And the big problem is that after eight years of government, and three terms in office, seeking a second decade in Canberra, this Government has presided over a decline in access to doctors and an increase in cost to get to doctors, if you can get on the books. Now that is the real reality of what's happening for Australians right now under this Liberal National Party Government. That's why this inquiry is so very much important in terms of us getting the detail of what's going on, on the ground. People everywhere are ringing our offices as parliamentarians and complaining that they simply can't get on to the books of the doctor let alone and get ongoing treatment. We've also got the constant change of doctors coming through while locums are coming in to try and fill in spots and a lack of continuity of care is causing a degrading of access to the service that people should be able to take for granted. If you're an Australian, it shouldn't matter whether you're in the city or the country, that you can get access to a local GP. That should be something that's a given, and the federal government is absolutely responsible for that. One of the saddest things that we've discerned during this period of time in our inquiry, particularly out of the evidence in Launceston, is that the Government's four year freeze on proper funding for GP’s has left GP businesses broken and sadly many of the Australians, young Australians who were training to become doctors, went out and went into those GP surgeries and they saw surgeries in crisis, not only in terms of staffing, but as in broken businesses where the cost was estimated in the Launceston hearing at $120,000 per annum of lost income for doctors. This Federal Government has broken the business model of GP's and Australians right across this country are paying, literally, with their lives because they cannot access primary health care in one of the wealthiest nations in the country. That's bad management in every possible way from an economic point of view, from a social justice point of view, and certainly from a health point of view. If I can, just one final thing, so bad, is the situation created by this Federal Government, that it is now the reality that only 15 per cent that is 1-5, not 50, 15 percent of Australian trained medical graduates are even thinking about becoming a GP. Mr. Abbott. Mr Morrison. And Mr Turnbull, in between all of them, are collectively responsible for breaking the GP model for Australia, they should be punished at the next election.
JOURNALIST: Are you concerned that there's going to be a big quality of life gap between regional Australians and metro Australians?
O’NEILL: There is a quality of life gap. There is a life gap. Most recently, I was just not far over the border from South Australia in the community of Wilcannia, and we were advised there that the death, that young men, and they are young men, die at the age of 38, that is the average rate in that community. Thirty eight, because there's no access to health care. There's also a failure to provide for the basics like housing. Education is a problem, and that also feeds into why young GP’s who’ve had the benefit of a great education, don't want to relocate their families to regional Australia where they are absolutely concerned about the quality of education for their children, where they can see a broken business model and where they themselves can't get access to a GP for their family. That is how critically broken this system is and it is absolutely to be sheeted home to the current Government. They do not deserve another decade of wrecking access to health for Australian people.
JOURNALIST: Since you have brought up the election and then saying that the Government should be punished at the ballot for its handling of rural health, I'm wondering what sort of what particular outcomes does Labor have if it were to win government? I know you've said before that you haven't yet announced your full health policies, but do you have an outcome or landmarks in mind for how people might judge the success of Labor's rural health strategy?
O’NEILL: I have no doubt that Australians want a very different picture in terms of their access to health. They're got to get more of the same with the current Government. The only way to change the government is vote for Labor members, to send them to Canberra, so if we can implement necessary change. This inquiry will be part of what we draw on in terms of providing a plan as we move forward. In the lead up to the election, we will make more solid announcements about what we will do to change access, and a whole suite of health provision that has fallen apart under this Government. So, there is no policy announcement that Senator Grogan and I are going to make here, in Whyalla, today, but we will form a government in the history and the tradition of great Labor governments and remember it's only Labor that had the vision for Medicare. That is a Labor legacy. It shows our commitment to access to health care for all Australians. That's our history, and the future of Australia, especially health access is safe in the hands of Labor. We can pretty well say right here with the evidence we’re receiving across the country, that the Liberal Government have failed. It’s massively, massively time for change.
JOURNALIST: I didn't ask you one thing, you mentioned 15 per cent of medical graduates don’t want to go to regional Australia. Can you give me some context for that? Is that a yearly figure from like 2021? Has that figure increased or decreased over the past 10 years? Can you give me some context to understand the relevance of that figure?
O’NEILL: So it has been in decline over the last 10 years. Under the Rudd Gillard Government there was a very significant increase in the numbers of placements for Australian students to train. What we've seen from Tony Abbott back as the Health Minister, was the erosion and the collapse of training. So, reinstating and training was a critical part of hope for the future. Sadly, as I see it, as that bloom of graduates moved out into training, they went to GP’s that were absolutely falling apart because of the pressure that the Government put on those businesses. So that's the context in which this decline in interest has occurred. There are great young people who are training, but they're making an option, their options are leading them to the hospital sector where they are secure in their employment, where they have proper payment, where they are getting much higher recompense for doing more predictable work with less challenge and largely in cities, or they're choosing to be a locum. All of those things are happening but none of that is providing the critical primary care that communities have a right to expect, and that Labor is determined to deliver. Because we understand that's the most efficient and effective and fair way for people to get the health care that they need in modern Australia. Thank you.
ENDS