Andrew Gee (Calare, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. Across the Central West, doctors are leaving the bush. From smaller towns like Canowindra, Kandos and Gulgong to larger ones like Wellington and Mudgee, our communities are being left without doctors, and those that remain can't cope. South Mudgee Surgery and now Mudgee Medical Centre have closed their books to new patients. This crisis is a disgrace that will cost lives. When will your government take real and effective action to immediately fix this outrageous crisis and deliver more doctors to Central Western New South Wales and country Australia?

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for that question. I'd be very happy to sit down with him and talk about some of the details of the clinics that he talked about. But I will say some more general things about the challenge of accessing a GP, particularly in rural and regional Australia but increasingly in parts of urban Australia as well.

As the member knows, there is not the ability to click fingers and suddenly create a whole bunch of new GPs. GPs take a long time to train, and we are steadily working on a plan which is already seeing a greater number of junior doctors take up general practice as their career. The number of junior doctors taking up general practice as their career and training as a specialist GP this year is almost 20 per cent higher than it was last year. We're also bringing in more overseas trained doctors than was the case before COVID. Obviously COVID was a particular experience. The number of overseas trained doctors and nurses we've brought into the country is about 60 per cent higher than it was in the full year before COVID.

We'll also put in place a range of incentives that seek to move doctors out of the cities and into rural communities. The incentives they are paid are higher than they were before we came to government. There's a range of other incentives. For example, the education minister has put in place HELP debt or university debt relief for doctors and nurse practitioners who graduate from university and choose a career in rural communities.

I'm not going to pretend to the member, or to anyone else in this parliament or across the community, that this is going to be fixed overnight. There was a decade of neglect of Medicare and a running down of general practice that had a really serious impact on the culture of general practice. Time and time again, we heard junior doctors saying that they simply didn't feel that general practice was a career that would suit their life—in spite of the fact that there are all sorts of attractions to that speciality compared to the more procedural specialties.

We're working very hard with state governments to fix this. When we came to government, there was one pilot, a small pilot in a part of New South Wales—again, to try and deal with some of the industrial disincentives to take up general practice as a career. We now have nine pilots, single-employer-model pilots, that ensure that GP registrars, as they're doing their several years of training, have a single employer and get all the industrial benefits, including access to paid parental leave and all the rest that goes along with that. We have a terrific trial that covers the whole of non-urban Tasmania; we have trials rolling out in states on the mainland, including in New South Wales, that slowly but steadily will start to increase the number of GPs coming through the pipeline.

This is a really serious challenge. I've tried to be as honest and clear about this in my time as health minister. I'd be happy to talk to the member about it in more detail. (Time expired)