Emma McBride (Dobell, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Calare has just done a victory lap, spruiking the margins of his colleagues in their electorates. What does that have to do with regional health care? Have you looked at the figures in regional health care—the delays in seeing services and the delays to access? Have you seen that? I worked at Wyong Hospital in a regional community in my electorate in my area for over 10 years. I worked in the inpatient mental health units. I invite the Minister for Health, Minister Hunt, to come with the opposition health spokesperson, Chris Bowen, and me to visit Wyong Hospital and see the conditions of people's lives and why they end up in emergency departments waiting before they end up in mental health inpatient units. In my electorate of Dobell on the New South Wales Central Coast, people are doing it tough under this government. We have over 21,000 age pensioners and a youth unemployment rate sitting at 18 per cent. It is young families and older people that most need health care. And where is funding being ripped out of health care? In regional Australia.

What people in regional Australia deserve is good, strong representation and a minister who cares about them and our community, not about spruiking PBS listings. One thing about spruiking PBS listings that particularly disturbs me as a pharmacist is: what about people delaying or avoiding filling prescriptions? You can spruik listing any drug on the PBS, but what if people can't afford to fill prescriptions? That is particularly a problem in regional Australia. According to ABS data, one in 14 people—seven per cent of people—avoid taking prescribed medicine due to cost, and we know the rate of people skipping prescriptions is twice as high in the most disadvantaged areas as in the least disadvantaged; it is 10 per cent of people in the most disadvantaged areas. This means that the cost of medicines is contributing to healthcare inequality in Australia. You can spruik listing PBS drugs, but if people can't afford them then someone will delay or avoid filling a prescription. I've been there in an outpatient clinic, where a mental health patient said to me, 'Which medication can I do without?' These are real people with major mental health problems who need proper support, and they're having to make this decision that no-one should have to make: 'Which one can I skip? Which one can I delay?' People are sometimes taking medication every second day, or they might get one prescription filled one month and another prescription filled another month. This is the state of health care in regional Australia. This minister just does not get it or does not care, and I haven't even got to vaccines, the national immunisation program and the outbreaks that are happening in communities yet. This minister is neglecting regional and rural Australia.

I'd like to give you an example. The minister was spruiking MRI licences yesterday. The hospital in Wyong, where I worked, has a shell in the new redevelopment plans. The Liberals tried to privatise this hospital. First they tried to sell it off. Now they're going to introduce paid parking when there is no public transport. We know that in the redevelopment plans there is a shell for an MRI machine but no Medicare licence for an MRI machine. Elizabeth Polson from Tumbi Umbi wrote to me about a recent emergency trip to Wyong Hospital, and I say this with respect to the staff who work there; it is the strain they're under. She had to have a CT scan at the hospital but needed further scans. She was waiting, and she had to be transported by patient transport to another MRI provider because she couldn't have it at the hospital. While she was waiting, this is what she witnessed. She was saying that people were in dire circumstances. Another person, Linda, sent an email to me while she was sitting waiting in an emergency department:

I'm currently sitting in the emergency waiting room at Wyong hospital, we are now into our third hour here, my daughter just had an X-ray for her leg, we were put back out into the waiting room because "there's no doctors to see her X-ray we don't have one to look at it yet.

She further describes 'outrageous treatment sitting here near whilst a grown man lays on the floor vomiting for more than two hours of this time'. This is what this government thinks is acceptable. I repeat my invitation for Minister Hunt to come and visit regional hospitals like Wyong—emergency departments or mental health inpatient units—and see the circumstances of people's lives and the results of the government's policies not just in health care but in education, transport and housing, which lead to people being in crisis and ending up in emergency departments or having long stays in public hospital inpatient units that are under strain and are not properly resourced, with staff who are ending up at risk of burnout. The government must do better.

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