Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Greenway for her question and I also thank her along with a large number of other members for attending with me, the Minister for Health and Ageing and Minister Mark Butler a Medicare Locals event in this parliament this morning. This was the first 19 Medicare Locals who are out there now bringing together services so that they can better offer community members who live in their local area coordinated care.

Of course, this has been part of the rebuilding of the health system we have needed to do as a result of the way it was when we inherited it in 2007, where of course the Leader of the Opposition had left it short of money, short of doctors and short of nurses—indeed, short of everything that goes to making a health system. He certainly left it short of any reform vision. He was happy for it to just gently decline, with the Commonwealth's share of funding into hospitals going down and down and down, as the waiting time that Australians had for emergency department care and elective surgery care just went up and up and up.

So we have had a lot to do, and today we took some more steps forward. We have reached a historic health reform agreement—a big change to our health system; as big as what was achieved under Medicare—which has put our health system, and particularly our hospitals, on a proper path for funding. We will be there as an equal partner in growth in hospitals—a very important reform.

But we recognise that more needs to be done, and particularly that many Australians end up in hospitals when they did not need to be there. We have very high hospitalisation rates compared with many countries that are comparable to our own. In order to reduce those hospitalisation rates we need to get people better care in the community. That means that we need better coordination. The modern burden of disease is of chronic and complex conditions. People need their GP but they also need a range of other health practitioners. Medicare Locals are about assisting with that coordination and enabling local communities to identify where gaps and holes are there and what would best work for their local community to fill those gaps and holes.

Then, of course, the health system does require capital, and one of the things that we have been very concerned about is the differential health outcomes between people in metropolitan Australia and regional and rural Australia, where there is a traceable difference in life expectancy. In order to make a difference for health care in regional and rural Australia, we have been making sure that capital is provided to bring in new facilities and to bring old facilities up to better standards in regional areas. That is why this morning I was very pleased, with the Minister for Health and Ageing and the Minister for Regional Australia, to announce that we are opening a new round of the Health and Hospitals Fund—an amount of $475 million. Applications are open and will close in October. We will make the necessary provisions and announce the results as part of the budget preparation process in 2012.

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