A health policy expert has backed Wagga MP Dr Joe McGirr’s Rural Health Action Plan. Photo: Shri Gayathirie Rajen.
A health policy expert has backed Wagga MP Dr Joe McGirr’s campaign to employ a GP in every rural town in NSW, but says the challenge would be to force the Federal and State governments to do what’s required to make this happen.
The poor state of rural healthcare in NSW has been the subject of numerous inquiries over the past decade. A chronic shortage of GPs means that residents in towns such as Leeton, Griffith and Narrandera sometimes have to wait weeks for an appointment, while those in smaller towns have to travel for hours to regional centres for healthcare.
The former CEO of rural advocacy group Healthy Communities Foundation, Mark Burdack, believes Dr McGirr’s plan is on the right track to address these problems.
“While I think the current workforce models would not support getting a GP in every town, what we need to do is say the number that we commit to, and then redesign our [workforce and education] models to achieve that,” Mr Burdack said.
“We need the number in order to get the programs in place, then evaluate whether they’re effective or not.
“All that money gets spent in the cities. If we just put that money into rural areas, we would transform rural Australia, and perhaps that is why governments don’t want to do it.”
Dr McGirr’s vision would not see a GP physically living in every tiny town in the state, given that some have populations of fewer than 300. What he’s aiming for is a ratio of one doctor for every 900 people, whereby a GP would have a home office in a regional town and then travel to see patients in surrounding smaller towns, with all his or her travel expenses covered.
While the specifics of this concept are not yet known, Dr McGirr said he was setting a goal and placing pressure on the State and Federal governments to commit to meeting it.
Mr Burdack said the hurdle lay in convincing the government to agree to fund the high costs of supporting these travelling GPs.
The other challenge would be attracting large numbers of professionals to regional towns in the first place, something that health bureaucracies have tried and failed to do for decades.
The longtime rural health advocate thinks the way to achieve this is by allowing communities to have their own services, rather than having them run by a centralised bureaucracy in Sydney.
He cites the examples of the Aboriginal community and the Sydney LGBT community, who are able to administer their own health programs.
“But when it comes to rural people, the government says, ‘No, you’re not allowed to run your own services. Everyone else can, but not you’,” Mr Burdack said.
“I think the government needs to see that there is a hypocrisy, and it needs to acknowledge that it is treating rural people differently to other communities in Sydney.”
Mr Burdack said rural communities used to have control over their own health services, but that changed after the Garling Report in 2008 following a series of high-profile mishaps in the NSW public hospital system.
Before that, local hospitals were community-owned – they had modern infrastructure and were funded by the community. Doctors were offered contracts directly by the local hospitals.
“Back in the 1970s, every single rural town in Australia had a doctor,” Mr Burdack said.
“As soon as the state government took over control of local hospitals from the community [after the Garling Report], doctors fled.”
Mr Burdack said he wanted government to focus more on training rural residents to become doctors, rather than bringing city-raised students to rural towns, where they’d be unlikely to stay in the long term.
“What rural people want is a doctor; what governments are committed to delivering is a good experience for students, and those two things are not the same,” he said.
“That’s why I’m strongly supportive of the GP guarantee that Joe’s put forward.”
Mr Burdack believes that by redirecting the money being spent on temporary doctors (locums) and rural education programs and scholarships that don’t work, the whole system could change “overnight”.
“We’re spending billions of dollars on rural medical education programs that we know haven’t worked for 20 years,” he said.
“What we need is rural medical schools with rural students being educated and trained in rural areas.
“It’s not about more money. It’s about the money being spent to deliver a goal that actually aligns with what rural people want.”
