Chris Trevor (Flynn, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on the urgent need for more doctors in Australia’s health system and the government’s plan to deliver better health and better hospitals.

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Flynn for his question. The Australian government is committed to a strong economy protecting working families’ jobs—hundreds of thousands of them—and keeping this economy out of recession, unlike those other economies around the world which went into recession through the global financial crisis. This Australian government is also committed to delivering on basics for working families in education, in health and in hospitals. That is why the Australian government has put forward a new National Health and Hospitals Network, funded nationally, run locally and, for the first time in the history of Australia, with the Australian government taking the dominant funding role for the future of the public hospital system. It is for these reasons that, in the last three days, I have been in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne talking to the Premiers of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland trying to forge a national agreement with the government’s plan, and that is why I will be heading to Western Australia before long as well—because those opposite had 12 years to act on the needs of our national health and hospital system and failed to do so.

For working families there is nothing more basic than having enough doctors, enough GPs and enough specialists. That is what the government is delivering through its policy today. Six in 10 Australians live in an area where there are shortages of available doctors. This applied when the now Leader of the Opposition, then Minister for Health and Ageing, occupied that position for four to five years. When we travel to regional Australia we hear time and time again right across the nation about the shortage of doctors, the shortage of GPs. I was told that doctors in rural Australia are caring for 137 more patients a year than their city counterparts. In some of our capital cities we have had comments emailed to the yourHealth website to say that a particular patient has had to wait for more than a week to get access to a GP—and that was from a patient in one of our capital cities. This is simply not good enough and the time for action has well and truly come. The government will be delivering more than 6,000 new GPs and medical specialists to deliver better health services and better hospitals for working families.

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They interject with ‘When?’ For 12 years they had time to act on this—the government’s plan begins now. There is a serious shortage of doctors in Australia. According to the Department of Health and Ageing, to maintain current levels of GP and primary care services it is estimated that an additional 3,000 GPs will be needed over the course of the next decade. Furthermore, the Australian Medical Workforce Advisory Committee and the medical colleges indicate that there will be a shortage of around 1,280 specialists over the next decade as well. This sort of advice is not new. Honourable members may be interested to know what the Leader of the Opposition was advised of when he was minister for health in 2005. The Australian Medical Workforce Advisory Committee’s report ‘The general practice workforce in Australia: supply and requirements to 2013’ stated there will be:

… an annual requirement of between approximately 1,100 and 1,200 workforce entrants between 2007 and 2013. The current estimated entrants are in the range of 700 per year …

The House will be interested to know that was the advice that the Leader of the Opposition as minister for health received in the year 2005, but instead of responding to these warnings what did the Leader of the Opposition do? He froze GP training places at 600. The Labor government, in its two years in office, has acted already in these areas. We increased the number of GP training places in 2009 by 12 per cent. We have provided 600 more scholarships for doctors since 2007. We have also funded 1,134 new training places for nurses and from 2009 universities have offered an additional 1,094 undergraduate nursing places.

I say to the Leader of the Opposition, as he squirms in his seat over his appalling record on health and as a leader of the opposition who as minister for health has a very poor record to defend and, more importantly, has no plans for the future: what this government has done is to deliver $632 million to train an additional 6,000-plus doctors and specialists. This will double the number of GP training places to 1,200 a year. We will more than double the number of specialist training places to 850 places a year. This will deliver an additional 5½ thousand new or training general practitioners, 680 specialists and, through other reforms we have introduced, 5,400 prevocational places for training our next generation of doctors.

These are fundamental and big reforms for the future. I say to the Leader of the Opposition: on GP training places alone, we will be investing $339 million to increase GP training places to 1,200 students per year, starting with 900 per year from next year. We will be doubling the number of GP training places we inherited from when Tony Abbott was minister for health. This is a fundamental and basic change for the future.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister will refer to members by their parliamentary title.

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are doing the same with specialist training places. I say to the Leader of the Opposition, who had four to five years to act on workforce shortages as minister for health, four to five years to act on GP shortages, four to five years to act on the shortages of specialists when he did effectively nothing other than to freeze the number of GP training places: this government is committed to delivering fundamental reforms to the health and hospital system for Australia, a national health and hospital network funded nationally, run locally and for the first time the Australian government is taking the dominant funding role for the future of Australia’s public hospital system.