Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Will the minister outline to the House any new research on health care in Australia?

Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Dobell for his question. I know with his background and the community’s interest that he has always taken a keen interest in healthcare matters. This morning I had the pleasure of launching Australia’s health 2008, the nation’s premier health report card compiled by the Institute of Health and Welfare. It is an authoritative report and I congratulate all of those involved in the mammoth task of researching, collecting and preparing it.

Based on the report, one fact is very clear, and that is that our health needs in this country are changing. GPs are increasingly working on chronic diseases as the burden of chronic diseases continues to increase exponentially. Each year there are 676,000 preventable hospitalisations. Most worrying of all, this report shows that in the eight years from 1997 to 2005 the supply of primary care doctors like GPs fell by nine per cent across the country.

These facts lead me to a number of conclusions. First of all, we need to refocus our health system to deal with the new tsunami of chronic diseases that is currently washing over us. This reshaping of the health system must concentrate on the need to keep people well and out of hospital, taking pressure off our already strained hospital system. We of course need to better equip GPs to tackle chronic diseases, and as the shortage of GPs becomes a more significant problem and more families are turned away from GP surgeries, with individuals ending up in hospital instead because they cannot get front-line care, we must examine new ways to utilise our health workforce and we must also look at how we can relieve the burden of red tape on GPs.

These conclusions are based on the raw facts that are in the report, and it turns out that the community agrees with these facts. Members might be aware that the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission has been travelling around Australia in the last few weeks hearing from members of the public about their ideas on health. Dr Bennett, the chair of this commission, has provided some information about what these consultations have revealed, and some of the community views that she reports are resurfacing time and time again are about the need to keep people well and out of hospital, about placing a greater focus on prevention and about the desire for a one-stop shop where people can access a local GP as well as other health professionals. In other words, there is a great deal of crossover between what the facts are telling us we need and what the community is telling us they want.

It is this combination, expert evidence as well as grassroots testimony, that is driving our government’s health policy. It is why we are investing $275 million in GP superclinics, it is why we have established a national preventive health task force, it is why we are committed to developing the first ever primary healthcare strategy for this country and it is why this morning I spoke about the need for us to rethink the gatekeeper model of primary health care. To really improve our health system we need to make the best use of the skills and qualifications of all of our health professionals, be they GPs, nurses or allied health professionals. We on this side of the House want people to have more access to health care, not to lock them out of it. The evidence that an organisation like the Institute of Health and Welfare provides is vital in informing these debates, and once again I want to congratulate the many people at the institute for the very hard work involved in the production of this important report.