Page 464 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 23 February 2010
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They were very extensive hearings and, as Mr Doszpot said, we thank all the community members, professional groups and organisations representing various members involved in primary care delivery for coming and giving their time, putting in very thorough submissions and presenting evidence to the committee. It was an extremely useful process. We heard from a wide variety of groups, from the AMA to groups who were delivering services to refugees and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, and it was all very useful in looking at how we can broaden the scope of primary care and what we deliver to the community.
Like Mr Doszpot, I would also very much like to give thanks for the work of the committee’s secretary, Grace Concannon, who did a fantastic job in putting together this very extensive and thorough report. This included compiling a great deal of information, not just from the hearings but from other sources, because we did look at a number of different areas, particularly issues that came up during the hearings.
I would just like to draw attention to some of the recommendations. In particular what came out of the hearings and also the reporting process was that we need to broaden the way we look at the delivery of primary care. We have various examples which have been delivered in the community, particularly around the integrated and holistic type of care model where people can go to access different sorts of services, and also preventive health. GPs have obviously been seen as the traditional way in which people access the health service, but there are other ways people can do that.
The recommendations particularly around looking at community health centres and having professionals and GPs placed in those community health centres are very important in expanding the way we look at the provision of primary care, and also the affordability of primary care. We have seen a move away from bulk-billing in GP practices. As Mr Doszpot pointed out, we have a very low number here in the ACT—in fact, one of the lowest in the country—and it is a major issue, particularly of affordability for people. It is an issue which sometimes we do not think applies to the ACT; but it does, and that became very evident through the evidence which was given to the committee by a number of different groups, including groups like ACTCOSS, who obviously very much know and hear about these sorts of issues through the work they do.
Recommendations 8 and 9 again look at enlisting more of a whole-of-government approach to GPs, particularly recommendation 9 about providing assistance to small general practices to employ practice nurses. As we know, many practices are not able to afford that and it is a very useful thing to have because it also looks at addressing the workload of GPs. Having a practice nurse or nurse practitioner, which again is a wider scope, in GP practices can very much address that issue. We heard GPs saying that they do have a lot of red tape to deal with. They have a very large workload and I think we do need to look at ways in which we can address that and ease that burden on them.
Recommendations 11 and 12 look at expanding that scope. The Pharmacy Guild presented evidence about how they would like to be included much more in the rollout of services and I think that is something we can look at because, again, pharmacies are often a point of approach for people when they have health issues. Pharmacists have a lot of connection with GPs as well, so we can expand on that.
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