Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like again to draw the attention of the parliament to the all-out attack on rural and regional communities in South Australia by the state government’s plan to downgrade 43 country hospitals to GP Plus centres—a polite euphemism for bandaid centres. I briefly spoke on this alarming situation earlier this week but as the days go by there is more and more to be concerned about. I met with the Rural Doctors Association yesterday and discussed their vehement opposition to the plan. There are confirmed reports that doctors in a number of country communities to be affected by the proposed downgrading are reconsidering their futures. The electorate is outraged: 400 people turned out at a protest meeting in Cummins on the Eyre Peninsula and 800 at Yorketown. Further meetings are being planned as I speak—one for Peterborough tonight and one for Port Broughton next week. At the Yorketown meeting an official from Country Health SA told those present if their needs could not be met at their local GP Plus hospital they could attend their nearest country general hospital in Whyalla. Whyalla is 4½ hours away by car. Are they serious?

To recap: of the 43 hospitals to be downgraded, 23 are in my electorate of Grey. Their downgrading will have catastrophic knock-on effects for the local communities. The ramifications of these moves appear not to be understood by the government. The plan allows for four general hospitals to serve all of regional South Australia. Two of them will be in my electorate, which is an area more than four times the size of Victoria. They will be supplemented by five community hospitals, which will offer a lesser range of services. Those services are yet to be determined and none are guaranteed. The remaining 23 communities currently enjoying 24-hour local hospital services will become GP Plus centres. Inpatient services at these hospitals will be closed and beds will only be available for things like aged care and 24-hour observations. Maternity, acute care and general surgical services will be discontinued. That means people will have to travel—in many cases hundreds of kilometres—to reach reasonable levels of service. This is not acceptable in any way. For example, it will be 175 kilometres from my house to the nearest real hospital.

The inescapable fact is that this trashing of country services will lead to avoidable loss of life. Patient transport costs will escalate. There is potential for cost blowouts in an already overworked and understaffed voluntary based ambulance service. Disturbingly, it has come to light that the figures quoted as justification for the plan are flawed. The number of beds currently available has been overcounted by a factor of 30 per cent and shows inaccurately low daily bed averages. The community consultation claimed by Country Health SA has been totally discounted by those present at these consultations, who claim that the sessions focused on primary health care and that there was no reference made to a reduction in current services.

Significantly, the South Australian government has neutered the health voice of rural and regional South Australians with the axing of hospital boards—the people’s representatives. It can only be assumed that this was part of the overall plan to muzzle dissent. What are the longer term ramifications of this decision? It is a fact of life that, if you do not have hospitals, you do not have doctors. Doctors will not come and work in country regions if they have no support and cannot manage their patients locally. As I said earlier, already a number have indicated they will be giving up practice in rural South Australia. I have already heard stories of contacts in Queensland enticing doctors to a more friendly environment. The ramifications for communities without doctors reverberate through the whole economic structure of these communities. The loss of nurses and allied health professionals will follow as they find the environment has changed and they are not able to practise their skills.

What happens next? Most of these communities offer a reasonable range of aged-care services. It is the right and proper thing that we make sure that ageing residents are able to retire in their local communities. Our hospitals and our doctors are the foundations of these services. When residents make retirement decisions they will move to the centres that offer a full range of services. This plan will lead to the destruction of the fabric of these communities. The rural doctors have called on the Prime Minister to intervene to stop the implementation of this plan, to commission a community impact statement and to establish a charter of rural health obligations. I back those calls. The Prime Minister committed to governing for all Australians; he promised to fix hospitals. I call on him and on the Minister for Health and Ageing to govern for the people of rural and regional South Australia and to save our hospitals.