Page 915 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 16 March 2010
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for health practitioners that will improve Australia’s health system and protect the safety and wellbeing of the community in the delivery of health services.
In 2005, the commonwealth government requested that the Productivity Commission undertake research to examine issues impacting on the health workforce, including the supply of and demand for health workforce professionals and to propose solutions to ensure the continued delivery of quality health care over the next 10 years. The establishment of a national system of registration and accreditation for health professionals was a key recommendation of the final report.
In March 2006, all members of COAG signed an IGA to establish the national scheme by 1 July 2010. The IGA contains the fundamental objectives of the scheme. It protects the public by ensuring that only practitioners who are suitably trained and qualified to practise in a competent and ethical manner are registered; it facilitates workforce mobility across Australia and reduces red tape for practitioners; it facilitates the provision of high-quality education and training and rigorous and responsive assessment of overseas-trained practitioners; it supports the public by promoting access to health services; it supports the continuous development of a flexible, responsive and sustainable Australian health workforce; and it supports innovation in education and service delivery.
The principles that underpin our objective of establishing the new national scheme are plain. The scheme will operate in a transparent, accountable, efficient, effective and fair manner. It will ensure that fees and charges are reasonable and recognise that restrictions on the practice of a health practitioner should only occur where the benefits of the restriction to the community as a whole outweigh the costs. The scheme will also maintain the status quo in that the current ACT legislation is contemporary and provides for a high level of public safety.
The process for establishing the national registration and accreditation scheme is a complicated legislative process and requires three separate pieces of legislation, which have become known as bills A, B and C. Bill A, or the Health Practitioner Regulation (Administrative Arrangements) National Law Bill 2008, was passed by the Queensland parliament in November 2008. This bill sets out the overall governance arrangements of the national scheme. The second piece of legislation, bill B, the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Bill 2009, was passed in the Queensland parliament on 29 October 2009. The ACT has now introduced legislation which will enable the adoption of bill B in the ACT.
In passing the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (ACT) Bill, or bill C, the ACT will be on target to support the national introduction of the scheme by 1 July 2010. Bill C adopts bill B in the ACT with consequential amendments relating to other relevant ACT legislation and a slight change to the complaints handling arrangements in bill B. Bill B only allowed for limited collaboration between health complaints entities and the national boards. While the ACT is committed to the national scheme, we currently have a complaints handling model which closely links the ACT health professional boards with the ACT Health Services Commissioner.
This arrangement is similar to the public interest assessor model, which was strongly based on the current ACT laws as proposed in the exposure draft of bill B. What
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