Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party) | Hansard source

I said in my maiden speech that your health should not be determined by your postcode. However, in my electorate of Mallee accessing health care continues to be a real challenge due to workforce shortages in primary, specialist and allied health. We are fortunate to have skilled, dedicated professionals providing excellent health care for the communities across Mallee; however, there remain significant barriers.

In Mildura, Monash University provides postgraduate training for medical students who are at various stages of their training elsewhere, but there is currently no pathway from secondary school through to the end of tertiary. This is an issue. Talented secondary students who wish to train in medicine must relocate to Melbourne, Adelaide or another major centre to begin their training, and frequently we then lose them. This profoundly affects our workforce and systematises the maldistribution of the medical workforce. Melbourne has approximately one doctor to 900 patients. In Mallee we have regions where there are thousands of patients for one doctor. It is absolutely untenable.

This is an issue that I have relentlessly advocated for since I stepped into office. I recently invited the Minister for Regional Health, the Hon. Dr David Gillespie, to meet with health leaders across Mallee and discuss this issue, among other challenges of regional healthcare delivery.

I met one junior doctor at Mildura Base Public Hospital, who, after establishing herself in Mildura for three years with her husband—also a doctor—is now moving back to Melbourne to pursue postgraduate ambitions in palliative care. We are not just losing one doctor; we are losing two.

We need to build and preserve our medical workforce in our regions. We lose some of our best and brightest students because we don't yet have a streamlined undergraduate-to-postgraduate training program. We need a closed pipeline of medical training from secondary to tertiary completion.

I've worked extensively in my first three years in office with the universities and the five federal ministers responsible for health and education—Ministers Hunt, Gillespie, Coulton, Tehan and Tudge—to secure an undergraduate biomedical course with wet lab at La Trobe University in Mildura. This is a vital first step to the bigger picture of making Mildura an independent, tri-state health precinct with end-to-end undergraduate and postgraduate medical degrees.

One of the major wins in this term of coalition government has been the implementation of the HELP debt relief for doctors and nurse practitioners who stay and work— (Time expired)

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