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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-04-03 Daily Xml
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Robe Nurse Practitioner

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (14:41): My question is to the health minister. Can the minister advise if a nurse practitioner has been employed in Robe? With your leave, Mr Speaker, and the leave of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr McBRIDE: Back in January, the minister announced that recruitment was underway to employ a nurse practitioner at both Robe and Ceduna as part of a two-year pilot program. These nurse practitioners are vital in regional communities as they help address the GP shortage.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:42): Thank you to the member for MacKillop for his strong advocacy on behalf of his local regional health services and in particular Robe. We know Robe is an important area of the state. It is an area of the state where the population significantly increases at various times of the year, and we are coming up to one of those times at Easter. It is an area that has been very well served for a long period of time by Dr David Senior as a medical practitioner, and I pay credit to him for his very longstanding service to the region and to the health care of all South Australians.

It is an area under pressure in terms of primary healthcare services, so the Premier was able to obtain through national cabinet some funding for primary care pilots to run in the state, and one of those areas that we identified was to pilot the use of nurse practitioners in primary care where they can play an expanded role of practice. Already, we have deployed three of those in the city: one in the northern suburbs, one in I think the Old Port Road clinic and one in the Reynella clinic as well, which have been providing excellent service for people in the city. But we wanted to make sure that we can pilot this program in regional areas as well, and we have identified Robe as one of those regional areas in which we want that to happen.

I am pleased to update the house that we now have commenced a nurse practitioner at the Robe medical practice. That has happened in the past couple of months in that well-established practice, providing care alongside Dr Senior to Robe and the surrounding community. I am advised there will be a further nurse practitioner who we are expecting within coming months to start in Ceduna as well. They are two areas of the state that are quite different but important and also face issues in terms of their access to primary care.

We believe that this will be a really positive development, and we believe it will also demonstrate to the federal government—whoever wins the forthcoming election—that if we can make changes to the Medicare system to allow the ability for nurse practitioners to undertake more work in the Medicare system, then that will open up the ability for patients to get access to really good quality primary healthcare services in city areas but also country areas.

We will certainly be undertaking very detailed studies of how this pilot has played out so we can present that work nationally. Then I hope that that will lead to more nurses deciding to undertake their further studies to become nurse practitioners and then more nurse practitioners undertaking this great work in the community to provide excellent primary healthcare services.

I hope that this will be very welcome news for the member for MacKillop and his local constituents, particularly in the Robe area, and that they will be able to go to a local nurse practitioner and receive treatment from their primary healthcare services in a timely way. This will all, of course, be covered, bulk-billed, under the program that we are rolling out. I hope that it is just the beginning of what could be national changes that can see more and more nurse practitioners playing this role right across the country.

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