Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to raise the issue of workforce shortage and the scheme that the government brought in a couple of budgets ago to encourage doctors to move to outer metropolitan areas. I understand that there has been a cut in funding to that scheme. I would like to ask the minister if he could go back and review the RRAMA classification scheme and the strategies that are in place to address workforce shortage issues. My area is classified as an area of workforce shortage, but I would like the government to make a lot clearer the method that they use for classifying those areas where there is not a doctor that is taking new patients and where there is a very elderly population. I would also like the minister to come back with information that will clarify for me and the people that I represent in this parliament why, in an area that is so close to inner Newcastle and Sydney, people are unable to see a doctor. I would like that information even for the benefit of my staff, who have to pick up people from their homes and drive them some 10 kilometres to see a doctor that will bulk-bill or even see new patients. I would also like the minister to come back to me and tell me what sorts of items are in this budget that are going to address that chronic workforce shortage.

On another issue, I notice that in the budget there is a line item for breastfeeding education support. The minister may or may not be aware—or may or may not be listening to what I am saying—that there is a line item for this going over the next five years. I would like details of what that line item refers to, what the government’s actual strategy will be in relation to breastfeeding, who it is contacting and who it is using as its resource. I understand that the government is removing questions in relation to breastfeeding from the national survey that is conducted by the Department of Health and Ageing and I would like to ask how this line item, which seems to indicate that the government is making some sort of commitment to breastfeeding, lines up with the fact that it is no longer asking questions about it. That is another question that I would like the minister to provide me with an answer to.

The next issue relates a little to one that the shadow minister raised earlier, and that is aged-care beds and the shortage of aged-care beds within the Shortland electorate. There is a chronic aged-care bed shortage. The Central Coast, I believe, has a shortage of just under 600, and in the Hunter it is just under 400. I would like the minister to come back to me with up-to-date figures on what those bed shortages are. In addition to that, I would like the minister to provide me with details of the actual bed shortage number in relation to operational beds, because those figures are calculated once again on bed licences that are issued and do not show the number of beds that have been approved but are non-existent—phantom beds, in other words. I would like to be able to very clearly identify in my mind the beds that are operational and those that are just phantom beds—those that are out there on paper but are non-existent and not available to constituents in the Shortland electorate.

See this speech in context