Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight I rise to talk about doctor shortages in the electorate of McEwen and the ineffective way that the District of Workforce Shortage and Area of Need frameworks are currently being applied. Areas like Sunbury and Whittlesea are facing real doctor shortages and have not been listed on the DWS or recognised as an area of need. These are areas experiencing significant population growth and expansion, which is placing increased pressure on existing medical services. Seymour, a regional area in my electorate, does not have a doctor shortage but is on the DWS. In fact, one of the medical centres in Seymour has contacted me seeking assistance in getting this reviewed because, in their view, they do not need more doctors being diverted to it.

I wrote to the Minister for Health on behalf of the Evans Street Medical Clinic in Sunbury about its difficulties in recruiting GPs. The minister assured me that the need for non-DWS communities to have sufficient numbers of GPs was understood and that replacement provisions are available. These provisions allow clinics to employ overseas trained GPs as full-time locum doctors for a period of up to six months or into after-hours positions. Not once did the minister address the other elephant in the room: the unfilled advertised position in the Evans Street Medical Clinic. The Evans Street Medical Clinic has attempted to recruit GPs a number of times. There has been no expression of interest, and the position remains unfilled. The replacement provision does not appear to have helped this situation. Surely this demonstrates that there is a doctor shortage.

The Whittlesea Family Medical Centre faces similar pressures in recruiting doctors, but they have raised a different issue. They are using the replacement provision, but there is a backlog in Medicare assessing Medicare provider numbers. Faced with the backlog and the fact that the medical centre is in a non-DWS area, its application is not going to be prioritised. This means Whittlesea Family Medical Centre must limit the services available to the community until Medicare finally catches up.

With significant expansion and growth in outer metropolitan areas like Sunbury and Whittlesea, we need to think how we identify the need in the GP space. A DWS is a geographic area where the local population has less access to Medicare subsidised services compared to the national average. The Department of Health uses the latest Medicare billing statistics and residential population estimates from the ABS to identify these areas. The problem with this data is that it is easily skewed. Larger medical centres use a greater number of services that are subject to the Medicare rebate. This skews the GP numbers on a per-head-of-population basis to appear that access to doctors in the area has gone up.

An increase in the number of medical services subsidised by Medicare is not equivalent to an increase in doctor numbers. I call on the Department of Health to rethink how we undertake the analysis of DWS. The data should be used to predict and plan for population growth, especially in growth corridors like the one McEwen is in. There should also be a way for medical centres to report GP shortages and to have this information taken into account and assessed in a timely way.

Let me show you the frustration that these medical centres face because there is no mechanism currently available. The DWS classification is the first criterion that the state health department uses to decide whether an area is eligible as an area of need. Once identified as an area of need, resources, including GPs, can be diverted to the area. It is a circular argument. To be an area of need, you need to be in a DWS. Being a DWS means you will be an area of need. The framework needs a circuit-breaker.

The Evans Street Medical Clinic and Whittlesea Family Medical Centre are working at peak capacity. The doctors are seeing the number of patients that they can, pushing Medicare's ceiling on the number of patients a doctor can see in a day. The Evans Street Medical Clinic also provides medical services to three aged-care facilities in Sunbury, which also is impacting on doctor shortages. There are over 1.1 million medical services provided to members of the community in McEwen each year, and 82 per cent of those are bulk-billed. If we do not find a circuit-breaker to fix this and find a way to address doctor shortages, no matter where they are, medical centres will limit the hours of operation and the services they provide to the community. This will impact on preventive health and treatment of chronic diseases. This will put further pressure on hospital resources, which are already stretched and under threat because of the cuts from the Abbott-Turnbull government.

I call on the minister to address these problems urgently and assist small businesses throughout Seymour and Whittlesea in the seat of McEwen so they are able to go out and service the community properly and ensure that preventive measures are put in place so that people can see a doctor when they need to and at the time they need to. The problem we have now is that many of the corporate medical centres in the city are able to take up all the doctors, and the doctors are not moving to regional areas. They are not going to outer suburban areas, because it is easier to stay in the city where they can see a lot of patients and live close to home.

This problem needs to be addressed. It is not something that I am attacking the minister about, but I think the minister needs to get up and do something about this, because this problem is going to spread right across Victoria and across the nation in the few months to come.