Gordon Reid (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Indi for raising this matter of public importance. The more we talk about health in this place and the more we talk about health in our communities, on the doors, on the phones and with our constituents, the more health care is kept in the national conversation, and that can only be a good thing. It can only be a good thing for the people that we here in this chamber serve. Many of us who are health professionals or who have worked in health administration or research know it's vital that we are there for our patients and there for our communities.

I want to thank the ministers and assistant ministers for their hard work with our recent policy announcements over the course of the election and also in the first 10 months of the Albanese Labor government, in particular Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler and Assistant Ministers Emma McBride and Ged Kearney for the fantastic work they do in the health space and for their previous service in the nursing and pharmacy spaces as well. Also, to the health professionals that I still work alongside at the Wyong hospital emergency department and also those who work in the Gosford Hospital health setting, it's important that we recognise you for the work that you do, and I say thank you.

Primary care and healthcare access is absolutely vital not just in my home on the Central Coast but right across the country. It doesn't matter what political colour your seat is—blue, green, teal or otherwise—and it doesn't matter who you are, where you are or where you've been; access to health care is absolutely vital, in particular primary care. Primary care centres around preventative medicine. It's preventative care. I've given examples in the chamber before of where preventative health is important—seeing that GP or getting in to see that pharmacist, making sure you're nipping issues in the bud quite quickly. Take for example hypertension, which is high blood pressure: it's making sure that you have access to the appropriate medications and getting your blood pressure checked so that we can prevent hypertensive or blood-pressure-induced strokes. I look at high cholesterol, also known as hypercholesterolemia: it's making sure that's getting checked with your pathology, getting your blood tests done, and then making sure you're on an appropriate medication or controlling your diet to prevent an acute myocardial infarction, which is a heart attack.

If you find there is a patient that has something called insulin resistance, where they're not dealing with the sugar too well in their body, if you can intervene and intercept that in the short term you can potentially prevent someone from going on to develop type 2 diabetes, which we all know has a drastic and severe consequences for not just the patient but the health system and the broader health economy as well. That's why, over on this side of the House, we are investing quite heavily and significantly in that primary care space, with the Strengthening Medicare Fund. Three-quarters of a billion dollars is going into strengthening Medicare. We created Medicare and now we're here to strengthen it so that access can be improved for patients right across the country.

Moving onto urgent care as well. This is really exciting. Allow me to nerd out for a moment, as a doctor. We're creating a new model of care in Australia. Other countries have this. The UK, New Zealand, the Scandinavian countries have this middle tier, where if you're too sick for the GP but not sick enough for emergency you've got somewhere to go. We have sporadic examples of that in Australia, but for the first time we are creating a new model of care that patients can go to if they need it. If you have a cut in your hand from washing up the knife in the sink, if it doesn't need surgery but only needs sutures—urgent care. If you've got a wound that requires through-the-drip antibiotics—urgent care. If you've got a fracture that doesn't require it to be reset in the operating theatre, and you just need a plaster and an x-ray—urgent care. These are things that are coming into our emergency departments that don't necessarily need to be there. They're a triage category four or five, and now we're providing them with a new level of care. I am proud that in my electorate of Robertson and in Assistant Minister McBride's electorate there will be two urgent care clinics that will be established, which was recently announced by Minister Butler as well. That's fantastic. Not only that; it's also going to be a bulked billed service, and it is going to be for adults and children, which is really, really important in terms of healthcare access.

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