Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) commends the Government for delivering on its commitment to address doctor shortages in rural, regional and outer metropolitan areas by updating the distribution priority area classification to support communities in need of general practitioners;

(2) acknowledges that practices in these areas will now be able to recruit from a larger pool of doctors, including international medical graduates and overseas trained doctors; and

(3) notes the Government's continuing support of access to quality, affordable healthcare through its commitment to establish 50 Medicare urgent care clinics across the country, making it easier to see a doctor for minor emergencies and taking pressure off hospital emergency departments.

Dunkley is a magnificent place to live. Most of my electorate is contained within the Frankston LGA, and some of my electorate, Mount Eliza, is within the Mornington Peninsula shire LGA. We're all in the South Eastern Melbourne Primary Health Network. It's a magnificent place to live, but, in Frankston, we do have some significant health issues. For example, emergency department presentations in the Frankston LGA are at just over 5½ thousand per 100,000 residents; The Victoria average is 3½ thousand. Urgent presentations are at 14,000 per 100,000; the Victorian average is just under 10½ thousand. Non-urgent presentations are at 1,500 per 100,000; for the rest of the South Eastern Melbourne Primary Health Network, it's just 1.3.

In 2019-20, Frankston had the highest number of lower urgency after-hours emergency department hospital presentations in our health network. That's almost 22 per cent per 100,000. We don't have enough GPs to service an area which has significant chronic health difficulties. We have significantly higher-than-average rates of arthritis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cardiovascular disease and the associated risk factors, such as poor dietary intake, obesity and physical inactivity. They're the highest in the region.

Something that concerns me greatly—many people would know why—is that, of women aged 50 to 74, just under 50 per cent participate in breast screening, whereas the Victorian average is 53.6 per cent. We have, almost unavoidably, a higher avoidable mortality rate for breast cancer—19 per 100,000—than the average for the region, which is just 16. We have higher numbers than average for our region's circulatory systems diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, colorectal cancer and respiratory diseases. We have significantly higher-than-average levels of obesity. And we have more residents than the rest of our region who experience cost as a barrier to accessing the healthcare system. No-one should experience cost as a barrier to accessing the universal healthcare system in this country.

For years now—almost since I was first elected—doctors, particularly in Frankston, Langwarrin and Carrum Downs, have been telling me they cannot attract enough GPs for their bulk-billing clinics. It has been a chronic problem that I lobbied the former government about over and over again, because we were not a distribution priority area for the recruitment of doctors. We kept getting told by the former government and the department that there was no problem. Yet we know there was, on the ground, and there has been until recently. It continues, but it's, hopefully, about to change. Jill, who's 80 years old, from Carrum Downs, contacted me because her preferred centre, the Ballarto Medical Centre, couldn't get her an appointment for five days, even though they wanted to, because they don't have enough bulk-billing doctors. We know that it's a problem in regional and rural areas in this country. It's talked about a lot, and more needs to be done. But it's also a big problem in the outer metropolitan areas, and before this current government, we often didn't feature in the conversation. That's why I'm so pleased that we've already delivered on the election commitment that the minister made to my electorate, which was that Frankston would be a distribution priority area, and it now is. It's not going to change overnight, but now my clinics can go and recruit not just Australian GPs—we know we need to produce many more Australian GPs—but also GPs from overseas.

The other thing that we're doing in my electorate is establishing an urgent care clinic to address the numbers of presentations at emergency rooms, to take the pressure off the hospital but also to make sure that people who have broken arms and legs, cuts and bruises, issues that they need to present urgently to get addressed but aren't as critical as many things that go to an emergency room, can get looked after immediately by a bulk-billing clinic by nurses and GPs. There'll be 50 across the country. One of them will be in Dunkley. Again, that's the difference between a government that thinks about and delivers on health care and one that doesn't.

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