Single Employer Model

The SPEAKER: And now for the Prince Alfred College students, we have one of your finest. He was part of the 1986 vintage, a fifth-generation student and his son Phillip, who graduated in 2014, was the sixth generation, I give you the member for MacKillop.

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (14:52): Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thank you for that introduction, and how true you were. My question is to the Minister for Health. What will the recent announcement by the state government of a trial to attract and retain more GPs in regional areas mean for the Limestone Coast? Mr Speaker, with your leave and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr McBRIDE: The Single Employer Model aims to support an additional 60 GPs across five local health networks, which includes the Limestone Coast. However, there are concerns the trial won't assist with doctor shortages in smaller towns.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:53): Thank you very much to the member for his question. It's a really important question about what is a really exciting program that the Premier and I announced on Friday.

For decades and decades, there have been issues in terms of regional workforce of doctors. There have been a lot of different things tried. Some of them have been okay, and a lot of them haven't resulted in change, but what we are embarking upon here we can see that there is benefit and there is the ability that this starts to move the needle in terms of getting more doctors into regional areas.

The reason why we can is because this is based on a model that has been working for the past two years in the Riverland and we are now taking this statewide across all of our regional areas, including the Limestone Coast. What is it? It is called the Single Employer Model and it is a change in the arrangements where, up until now, if you work in primary care as a GP you get paid through Medicare on a fee for service basis, and if you work for the hospital you get paid from SA Health a salary or other arrangements through there.

This allows doctors in training to come through a program, predominantly through five-year contracts with new doctors coming in, for all of their postgraduate training that allows them to be paid as an employee from SA Health and for us to receive that funding that would otherwise go through Medicare for their work in primary care and then pool that with hospital resources to be able to pay them a salary.

Why is that important? Because it is more attractive for doctors, particularly at that stage in somebody's life. If you imagine you are in your mid-twenties and have graduated medical school, it is a time in their life when people are thinking about starting a family and so suddenly maternity leave and paternity leave are important considerations. If you are doing GP training, you don't have access to those benefits, let alone all the other leave and salary abilities that you have as an SA Health employee.

That is an attractive element. Having the certainty of that contract is attractive. Having the ability to do all of this training in the country areas is attractive as well. What this has meant is that the Riverland has seen really strong uptake in terms of doctors being part of this program. I want to thank the team up there—Wayne Champion, Paul Worley and Caroline Phegan—who have spearheaded this over the past few years.

What they are seeing up there is an astonishing 98 per cent retention rate through this program, I am advised. That is really exciting, and there are now 30 of those trainees going through the RACE program up there. It has translated to a 25 per cent increase in the hospital and general practice workforce in the Riverland.

Now we have the approval from the federal government to turn this into a statewide program, and all of our local health networks are working with their local GPs on the ground to put in place training and to have that work between the hospital system and general practice to enable this to occur. I think the Limestone Coast is an area where we will see a strong interest in this program and work between GPs and the hospital system. Already, there have been some indications of that.

The member raises questions in terms of what this means for the really small communities. I think we can see already in terms of the member's own community, in terms of Lameroo and Pinnaroo, that the fact that we now have more doctors based in the Riverland has meant some of those doctors have been able to come and support those smaller hospitals as well.

I think we will start to see the same thing happening in other areas as well. As we build the workforce overall, then the lifting tide lifts all boats. That is ultimately what we want to see happen, to make sure that every community across the state can get access to the care it needs. I want to thank everybody involved in this program. I am really excited about it. Hopefully, it is going to make a big difference.