Mount Gambier GP Services

The Hon. B.R. HOOD (15:40): I rise today to speak on an issue that is hitting the people of Mount Gambier hard: the growing GP shortage in my community. In June this year, the Medicare Urgent Care Clinic closed its doors. That closure confirmed what the AMA warned all along: that Urgent Care Clinics risk doing more harm than good if they are not backed up by sustainable long-term planning.

Since then, every part of our health system in the South-East has been under pressure. Today, not a single general practice in Mount Gambier is accepting new patients. The Village Medical Centre, Hawkins Clinic and the Limestone Coast Health Hub have all closed their books. What does that mean in practice? It means the people who should be seeing a GP are being pushed to telehealth services, which many cannot access. Some are even turning to AI, TikTok and other unreliable sources of medical advice.

It means more patients are showing up in our EDs not because they need emergency care but because they have nowhere else to go. That emergency department is already stretched, with staff working under immense pressure. They are abused daily by frustrated patients who face long wait times. This is not fair on patients and it is certainly not fair on the dedicated staff doing their best in impossible conditions.

I want to thank the Village Medical Centre practice manager, Jessie Bilal, for her tireless advocacy on behalf of our community. Over the past four years, Jessie has repeatedly sought solutions to the GP crisis, contacting the PHN, engaging with the local health network and writing directly to Minister Picton and Minister Butler. Despite her persistence, she received little more than automated replies, contradictory advice and letters shuffled between state and federal offices without reply.

Jessie and her clinic have taken it upon themselves to recruit and expand using their own limited services, yet they remain hamstrung by a lack of supervision and support for their international medical graduates and this is a bottleneck the government refuses to address. Her experience reflects the broad frustration of my community, left without answers despite her consistent and commendable efforts.

Thanks to Jessie, I have also been raising the alarm with both state and federal governments for over a year now. I wrote to Minister Picton way back in September last year and then again in August I wrote to Minister Picton and Minister Butler, pointing out that a city of 27,000 people cannot be left with inadequate GP coverage. I stressed that residents should not have to travel hundreds of kilometres just to access basic services. I welcomed the opportunity for dialogue, but unsurprisingly no response came.

On 18 September, I wrote again seeking clarity as to whether there was a plan to reopen the Urgent Care Clinic and, if not, could funds be redirected as grants to private practices for infrastructure upgrades to ensure they could expand services for the community, but again silence. This lack of transparency and accountability is deeply concerning.

Then came reports on 6 September that the health minister personally phoned the Mount Gambier hospital late at night—and this is a Saturday night—directing them to unramp ambulances in the emergency department. It is strange that a minister would do that at all, but stranger still given that ramping has been denied as even happening in Mount Gambier by the Premier as reported by ABC South-East. Yet here we have a minister on a Saturday night calling a hospital to demand that ambulances be unramped, and how was it done? By moving patients through the system faster, regardless of whether wards could actually take them.

Nurses reported patients being transferred to unfamiliar wards late at night. Patients were moved to places where staff simply did not have the capacity to care for them properly. So instead of fixing the ramping that they did not even acknowledge exists, Labor shifted the problem inside the hospital—out of sight, out of mind.

This is no solution; it is a political directive designed to protect the government's image, not the health of patients. And let us remember: this came just weeks after Labor proudly announced six new beds for the ED, beds that clearly have done nothing to stop ramping in Mount Gambier. The people of my city, Mount Gambier, deserve better than a government that hides the problem. They deserve access to local GPs, proper investment in regional health services, and policies that are sustainable, not just headline grabbing.

While GP recruitment is ultimately a federal issue, the state government must acknowledge reality and act in the interests of Mount Gambier because right now 27,000 people in Mount Gambier are being left behind, and if the government will not act, the costs will be borne not in headlines but in the health of real people—our people.