President of the Australian College of Emergency Medicine Dr Clare Skinner is urging the federal government to fundamentally transform primary care and redress the current healthcare funding model.
The CEO of Australian College of Nursing Adjunct said the healthcare system could not afford to continue on its trajectory where emergency departments were overwhelmed by patients with conditions that should have been avoidable.Emergency department doctors contending with rising numbers of deteriorating patients are backing GPs calling for a radical overhaul of Australia’s healthcare system, warning that it is no longer fit for purpose.
Skinner’s call for action is a clear signal to the federal government that doctors on the frontlines of Australia’s overwhelmed hospital systems are backing GPs’ call for urgent reforms in primary care, amid reports ofHer comments come as the government’s Strengthening Medicare Taskforce prepares to meet on Friday. The taskforce is charged with ending Australia’s primary care crisis, with a budget of almost $1 billion over four years.
In a communique following the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce’s first meeting last month, Health Minister Mark Butler said: “There is no doubt that primary care around the country is in a parlous state.” The plan sketches out major reform, including a shift from an illness-centric and fragmented system towards a prevention and wellbeing model that is integrated, multidisciplinary, and focused on “what matters to patients”, rather than “what is the matter with patients”.One key pillar of the plan is a scheme known as voluntary patient enrolment , whereby a patient would enrol with a general practice, and the practice would get an annual payment for that enrolment or other benefits.
“This is the result of decades of underfunding and under-resourcing primary care,” she said. “We’re seeing people with chronic and complex illnesses who have deteriorated to the point where they need a hospital admission because they haven’t been able, or can’t afford, to access that care in the community.“Then there are no hospital beds available for them because there are other people occupying those beds who can’t be discharged for the same reasons,” she said.
GP clinics are sending away sick patients to hosp because they dont want to be sued after bulk billing gone wrong
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