Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition has taken responsibility for the Health and Hospitals Fund. There is $475 million in the most recent budget which is going into new and upgraded health facilities in regional Australia. The government is fully delivering on that $1.8 billion commitment that it made to have a regional priority round for the Health and Hospitals Fund. In the most recent budget there are 76 new projects for communities right across Australia, giving patients better access to hospital services in the bush. This infrastructure investment is giving us long-term improvement in health infrastructure as well as providing much needed local jobs during the building and construction phases of these projects.

The patients will benefit from these projects in communities right across Australia, including multipurpose services in regional centres like Broken Hill, Bundaberg, Griffith, Hillston, Kempsey, Lismore, Peak Hill and Warracknabeal. There are new and integrated upgraded facilities to support additional dental services, which I alluded to earlier, to benefit patients in areas like Cranbrook, Murray Bridge, Pilbara, Kimberley and Yamba. I went to the site of the new Yamba community health facility as well. There is fantastic local support for that. They have been campaigning and arguing for that for many years, and we were able to deliver it for the community of Yamba. There are services like the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia, with additional funding for aircraft and patient transfer facilities, and mobile oral health facilities and staff accommodation.

One of the supports that this new infrastructure investment gives is the ability to house and train GPs, doctors, nurses and allied health professionals in areas like Broken Hill, Ulverstone and Katherine. We know that if people train in regional or remote locations, they are much more likely to go back and work there in years to come, or to go to communities like the one they trained in. If all of their training happens in the city locations, they are much more likely to end up practising in city locations. So that infrastructure investment is not just in the bricks and mortar for today but in our workforce of the future as well. We have improved accommodation for students and health professionals including locums in communities like Ballarat, South Gippsland, Halls Creek, Mount Isa, Thursday Island, Charleville and Bairnsdale.

The investment that we have made of $5 billion through the Health and Hospitals Fund has been phenomenally important and has included some very large hospital upgrade investments, like at Lismore in New South Wales, and it has been terrifically exciting to see the improvements in patient care. But those small community projects have also been important and very well received.

See this speech in context