Congratulations to East Grampians Health Service

As a board member of the East Grampians Health Service today I was privileged to attend two award ceremonies for Lowe Street and Willaura aged care facilities. After an incredibly rigorous accreditation process both facilities passed all 44 standards. A great achievement on the back of very hard work by many staff.

The Hon. David Hawker, Member for Wannon officiated at both ceremonies and presented certificates of achievement. At both centres board members paid tribute to the long and personal interest David has taken in the Ararat and Willaura health services and communities.

How will rural Victorians see a doctor now?

Already stretched rural and regional health services in Victoria are poised to face lower funding levels and find it even more difficult to attract doctors and other health professionals because of ill-advised “reforms” to what counts as rural and remote.

The Rudd Government spruiked regional and rural health services as a big winner in Tuesday night’s budget. The centrepiece of the announcement was $134.4m package designed to alleviate the significant doctor and other health professional shortages in rural and regional areas. Under the new policy the more remote a health professional moves, the more extra money they get. So a doctor moving from Melbourne to the back of Bourke would receive $120,000. In theory this could be a useful way to attract doctors to very remote areas. However for Victorian rural health services there are already a number of programs, introduced by the Howard Government, including remote area payments of up to $30,000, that are now  under threat.

Buried in the detail of the announcement is reiteration of a previous announcement that “from 1 July 2009, the outdated and flawed Rural, Remote and Metropolitan Areas (RRMA) system will be replaced by the Australian Standard Geographical Classification – Remoteness Areas (ASGC-RA) system. ” It all sounds innocuous, perhaps even logical to replace a classification system based on 1991 population figures with one now based on the 2006 census. And if that was all the change meant then few could object. But the differences between the old RRMA system and the new ASGC-RA mean almost all of the rural and regional Victorian population is now classified as Inner Regional.

And this has profound implications for health funding for Victorian GPs and hospitals. It is already extremely difficult to attract medical staff to country Victoria. Despite large overseas recruitment drives so that over 60 percent of rural GPs are overseas trained there are still severe shortages. With most of rural Victoria now being treated the same way as Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo, why would a doctor move to a small country town, with far fewer potential clients, and little chance of professional interaction, when they can move to a bigger regional city with the same incentives?

The Government has apparently  mollified some industry interest groups by promising a “grandfathering” of existing arrangements for Victorian GPs. Yet all that means is rural Victoria is locked into current practice arrangements with no chance of merging with hospitals or other arrangements on pain of severe funding losses. As Dr Bertuch, partner at the Ararat Medical Centre said in yesterday’s Ararat Advertiser the additional funding “will mean nothing if Ararat is reclassified as ‘inner regional’.” The week before in the same newspaper Dr Norman Castle, Director of Mediacl Services at Stawell Regional Health “warned it he Federal Government’s proposal to change rural classifications for health funding is allowed to go through it will be disastrous.”