Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Rural, regional and remote Australia is often the canary in the coalmine when it comes to health and the challenges that it's currently facing, and right now that could not be a truer statement. So I was delighted this morning to join the National Rural Health Commissioner, Ruth Stewart, to launch the National Rural and Remote Nursing Generalist Framework. The framework has been designed to be utilised by registered nurses across rural and remote Australia to support and sustain our nursing workforce into the future, and I commend the work of peak nursing bodies in leading this development work.

The launch comes at a critical time because, as we know, health workforce shortages are a serious issue across our entire health system. Workforce is raised as the single biggest issue currently facing healthcare professionals, but it's out in the country that access to additional workforce was already a challenge and has now become even more acute. To solve the problem for rural, regional and remote Australia will almost definitely solve it for the whole country, because we know that solving a problem in one area alone will only make it worse in another unless we look at the whole picture.

We saw this with Labor's changes to the distribution priority areas for overseas trained doctors, which saw GPs redirected into the metropolitan areas in an attempt to solve workforce shortages in the city. Doing so only makes the pressures faced by rural, regional and remote communities worse. These communities are now struggling to retain their doctors or to bring in new ones, because they can't compete with the bright lights of the city. It's clear that, unless we grow the total number of GPs and nurses in Australia, attempts at solutions will only continue to redistribute the problem to other areas, like a giant game of whack-a-mole across the Australian map. We know that immigration is the obvious and immediate short-term answer, but, unless the distribution of those international healthcare workers is well considered, it will be a disaster. In the long term, we need to make sure that we have a multifaceted approach so we attract healthcare professionals to our regions. We must stop making a problem worse in one area to solve another. (Time expired)