Regional GP Services

Mr BELL (Mount Gambier) (17:03): My question is to the Minister for Health. Can the minister provide an update on efforts to recruit GPs to regional areas? With your leave, sir and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr BELL: Over the past eight weeks, Mount Gambier has experienced the closure of the Urgent Care Clinic, the Mount Gambier Family Health practice and a second general practice clinic is currently operating without a GP. At this current point in time, there are no general practice clinics in Mount Gambier, the second largest city in South Australia, accepting new patients. Is there any action the government is taking to address this urgent shortage of doctors?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (17:03): Thank you to the member for Mount Gambier for this important question. We know how critical general practice is for people right across the state and right across the country.

Obviously, while it is predominantly the commonwealth government's responsibility, in terms of the provision of general practice services through Medicare and also through Medicare urgent care centres, it is something the state government takes a very significant interest in and works collaboratively with the federal government and primary health networks in terms of how we can assist to address these issues. I am obviously concerned in terms of Mount Gambier in particular as a major regional centre in this state and the pressure that it puts in terms of our emergency services.

Obviously, it is something that the government is investing in and we are soon to open the upgrade in terms of the new Mount Gambier expansion of the emergency department there, but we do not want to have a failure in terms of the federal government's general practice services, leading to more pressure on our emergency departments. The good news is that there is a lot of action that has been taken in term of general practice. The downside is that a lot of those things take time.

In Mount Gambier, and in the Riverland as well, the really positive news is that we now have Flinders University undertaking regional medical training, so students are undertaking their entire degree based in regional areas. That is a great asset for the Limestone Coast to have into the future that doctors will be undertaking their university training in the region. Adding to that, we through the state government are undertaking work to do the next level of their training based in regional areas across the whole state.

This is a program that first ran through the Riverland, through the Riverland Academy of Clinical Excellence. It is called the single employer model, where we are able to employ doctors after their graduation to work in their general practice training to become regional specialists, to become rural generalists as it is called, to work in public hospitals in regional areas but also to work in general practice. We have had to get exemptions to the Medicare rules for that to happen, and it has been very successful in the Riverland in terms of the recruitment of doctors to that region.

We now have permission for that to roll out across the state. We now have trainees in that program who are undertaking that across the state, and that is going to continue to grow and grow over time, which is an excellent potential future pipeline of those doctors, but obviously that takes time as well.

The other area where states and territories and the commonwealth have worked together is in terms of the work that we are doing to try to improve our pipeline of attracting general practitioners from other countries, particularly countries where their training is requisite to our training, particularly the United Kingdom where we know that there are a lot of UK doctors who are keen to move to Australia. We want to try to make that as easy as possible, of course maintaining all the safety rigorous steps that we need to do so.

We have put in place what is called an expedited pathway. That has been in place for a few months now and is seeing doctors, who I understand predominantly have been coming from the UK, coming to Australia through that expedited pathway, removing some of the steps for doctors who are accredited in the UK having to jump through multiple hoops. Where we have been able to be successful in terms of the recruitment of doctors from the UK, sometimes it takes years to jump through all the hoops, even though they have all the accreditation of the UK system, which is obviously requisite to ours. That is another potential way by which we can address this issue.

In term of the urgent care centre, very briefly, the federal government is out to tender again through the primary healthcare network, after the previous provider hit financial difficulties, and we are hoping that a new provider will be able to take that up and provide those services to the community.