Booleroo Centre GP Registrar

The Hon. G.G. BROCK (Stuart) (15:01): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Can the minister please update my community at Booleroo Centre regarding the future of the Booleroo Centre GP registrar? With your leave and that of the house, sir, I will explain a bit further.

Leave granted.

The Hon. G.G. BROCK: Recent events that have occurred at Booleroo Centre will result in the community losing the services of their GP registrar. As a result, community members may have to travel over an hour to surrounding locations which, if they can afford to do so, will also take the place of other people in those locations.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:02): I thank the member for Stuart for his question. As the member has alluded to, there has been an issue where there are, as I understand it, currently two doctors providing service in Booleroo Centre. These are primary care services which, of course, are under the purview of the federal government, not the state government. One of those doctors is a GP registrar who, due to issues with Medicare eligibility, is likely to have to withdraw their services in the coming weeks.

That leaves another doctor who is providing services to Booleroo Centre and its community, but of course we want to see those primary care, federal government, GP Medicare services expanded and strong across regional South Australia, including at Booleroo Centre. So the state government, through the Yorke and Northern Local Health Network and our Executive Director of Medical Services, has been working with the practice trying to do what we can with agencies such as the Rural Doctors Workforce Agency to see if we can increase the staffing when that one doctor leaves.

In terms of the basis of the question that everyone is going to have to travel, I am advised that will not be the case, given that there will be a doctor there, although obviously we would like to see that get back up to two in the local area. Of course, about half an hour away is Jamestown, where the Goyder's Line Medical practice is in operation.

These are issues we face across regional South Australia and across regional Australia in terms of GP services, and we are always working with the federal government to try to identify ways in which we can improve the supply of GPs in regional areas. One of those ways is the work we are doing in terms of the Single Employer Model which, having been very successful in the Riverland region of South Australia, is now expanding across the rest of South Australia, where we can have GP registrars working between the public hospital system and primary care system and employed by SA Health, with a Medicare exemption, to enable that to happen. We are optimistic about the benefit of that.

We are also optimistic in terms of the benefit of what has just started in the past year at Flinders University—the new regional medical school which now has a whole fleet of medical students who are undertaking their entire practice while based in regional areas. So, as opposed to a previous scenario where people would do all their medical school training in the city and then most of their postgraduate training in the city, now people can do the whole lot in regional South Australia, which is fantastic news. We are hopeful that that will lead to improvements.

In the meantime, of course, we have to continue the work on international recruitment. Of course, there are a lot of GPs, particularly from the UK, who have come to Australia and South Australia in the past few years. That has increased, and one of the ways that has seen increased numbers is through the work that we have done to reform, through what was called the Kruk review, the process between immigration, the Medical Board, AHPRA, and the colleges by which people can jump through all the hoops, particularly from countries like the UK.

So a doctor in the UK can now, rather than needing to get separate college accreditation here, go through that expedited pathway and have their UK college accreditation recognised here in Australia. That has helped. Not only has it helped a number of doctors come through that pathway, but also I think it has sharpened the colleges' pathway and the expedited way that they are doing their applications to get more GPs here into Australia and into South Australia in particular.

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