Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

All Tasmanians know that sinking feeling: your kids come off a bike screaming blue murder, your elderly father has woken up in the middle of the night with chest pains he can't explain, or your partner has a high fever, and you know they need urgent medical help but, in our state, you don't know how long it will be before they get it. The federal government's promise to all Australians is that we will get free, high-quality health care whenever we need it. But that's not how things work in Tasmania. Here, elderly people die before they can see a doctor in the emergency ward. In Tasmania, we travel for hours, pay through the nose and wait for weeks before we can see our closest GP. Something's got to give. We have to take the pressure off the nurses and doctors who work in our emergency departments and get Tasmanians the medical help everyday Australians deserve.

This is what I am proposing: Launceston, the North West Coast and Hobart need urgent care centres that provide free medical care—and fast. You would visit the centres for everything from cuts to burns, to broken bones, to wound dressings or a fever. They would be run by professional registered nurses and would provide immediate high-quality care, seven days a week, including after hours—and you wouldn't pay a cent for any of it, either. People who need emergency help will get it, instead of waiting for hours in an ambulance on the hospital driveway, in the ramping, where they can see the hospital staff who otherwise would have been treating them.

Nearly 9,000 people who showed up at the Launceston General Hospital with an urgent medical problem were not seen on time last year. That's 9,000 too many. It's countless numbers of Tasmanians waiting to see if their kids, parents or partners are going to be alright. It's time to do something different, and urgent action needs to be taken. Therefore, I'm calling for urgent care centres that will finally give Tasmanians the health care we deserve.