Page 1319 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2009
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wand and just fix this automatically—that we do work together in the interests of our community to look at whether there are other ways that the ACT government or the ACT Assembly, through legislative reform, can improve the situation.
The ACT government has made a number of election commitments around support for general practice. Of course, those are all being considered in the context of this year’s budget. They were, again, around longer-term solutions which involve support for general practice to take on medical students and to open up their practices. It does cost them money. They do have to keep appointments free in order to take on that mentoring role. But it is something traditionally that general practitioners have taken very seriously.
In times when workloads are very high and costs are high, it is difficult to wind back work and take on a volunteer approach to the training of medical students. But unless we train the next generation of medical students and encourage them into general practice there will not be a solution to this. It is not simply about going overseas and removing doctors from areas where they are needed as well and bringing them to the ACT so the ACT does not have a problem any more. That is one approach and a measured way of doing things in terms of how we accept international medical graduates into our GP practices. It is an important part of continuing to address workforce shortage but it is not that easy and it is not that simple.
When you see a workforce shortage like the one we are experiencing, there is no quick fix to it. But maybe there are ways to work better. Maybe there are ways to support our existing general practitioners better so that they have more time to do their work. There are continuing discussions that I will be having with the commonwealth and I am very happy to raise this issue again at ARMAC. I have been raising it and other jurisdictions have been raising it where similar workforce shortages occur—for example, in the Northern Territory and other jurisdictions where there are large, remote and rural locations.
It is not something that is peculiar to the ACT and we should remember that. This is something that is affecting the nation. In some ways the nation’s response is needed. But if there are things that the ACT government can individually do to improve the situation, to support general practice, to encourage more students into training opportunities and encourage more students into a life as a general practitioner, then they are the areas that we have been working on. They are the areas we will continue to work on. If there is further legislative reform that we can implement that does not unfairly target general practice, let us have a serious look at that as well.
That is the commitment I give the Assembly in terms of pulling together the work that I have been doing over the past 12 months, bringing in some additional expertise and reporting back to the Assembly in September. If there are concrete recommendations that come out of that work, they will be placed before the Assembly for its consideration.
MR DOSZPOT (Brindabella) (3.52): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.
Ms Gallagher: You are not going to be nasty again, are you, Steve? You do not have Zed’s speech there?
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