Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Mental Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Acting Deputy Speaker. I am very pleased to respond to the matters raised by the member for Page. She has been a strong advocate not only for health reform generally but particularly for the needs of regional Australia, and for mental health, along with a number of other regional members of parliament on this side of the main committee, including the member for Capricornia, the Parliamentary Secretary for Health, who have tirelessly advocated for the needs of regional communities. We do know, as the member for Page outlined, that Australians living in rural and regional and particularly remote Australia experience greater difficulty than metropolitan Australians in getting access to quality health care. That has been a particular focus of this government over the last 3½ years.

The member for Page outlined a number of ways in which her community, the community she represents, has benefited from that, ranging from the integrated cancer centre to upgrades to the Grafton and Lismore hospitals to GP superclinics, which improve access to basic primary care in those regional communities. She also alluded to the broad $560 million program to deliver regional integrated cancer centres in rural and regional Australia which help to close that gap in cancer care that the member for Page outlined.

There are also wonderful benefits that regional Australians are going to derive from our e-health program, a program that has not been the subject of questions yet. I know that in South Australia, for example, in the last couple of weeks we announced a cooperative program with the South Australian government to deliver new facilities for tele-psychiatry to, over time, up to 100 country hospitals or health centres in South Australia, which will allow remote diagnosis. Because of the quality of the bandwidth and the quality of the equipment being used in those facilities, it will allow remote diagnosis for the first time from Adelaide by resident psychiatrists at Glenside Hospital, the major psychiatric hospital in Adelaide, as well as some other places in Adelaide. This stops regional South Australians in that case having to be transported to Adelaide just for the purpose of diagnosis and will significantly reduce the level of trauma involved in that particular area of health care and improve the level of care provided not only to the people themselves but also the support provided to their families. Utterly central to our approach to improving health for regional Australia is the Health and Hospitals Fund. The member for Page has outlined a range of ways in which this government has supported capital improvements in the health system in regional Australia and, as everyone in the Main Committee knows, the latest round of the Health and Hospitals Fund has been focused particularly on regional Australia because we know that regional Australia needs particular attention to ensure it has equal access to the quality health care enjoyed by those living in the capital cities.

There was very significant interest in this latest round, funded by the budget in May. There were 237 applications made to the Health and Hospitals Fund Advisory Board, 114 of which were identified by the advisory board as satisfying the evaluation criteria and funding, to the tune of about $1.3 million, has been allocated for those 63 regional projects. Another half-a-billion-dollar round will be opened later this year, again, with a priority focus on regional Australia, which will allow a number of those projects that were assessed as appropriate being considered by the Health and Hospitals Fund Advisory Board in that later round.

The 63 projects include a very broad range of initiatives in regional Australia. I know that the shadow minister for health and ageing will be particularly interested in the subacute or integrated care centres funded through this round for mental health care in regional Queensland. There has been a significant gap in Queensland for a considerable period of time in this area. People are cared for either at an acute level in Queensland or at a primary care level. We know the importance of improving subacute care. There have been a range of other projects for regional hospitals: dental care, primary health care, further cancer infrastructure and such like. I thank the member for Page for her ongoing interest in improving health care not only for her constituents but for regional Australia generally. (Time expired.)

See this speech in context