Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

Last week in Perth I spoke at RMA25, a conference co-hosted by the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine, and the Rural Doctors Association of Australia. I spent most of the day listening—I think we could do more listening and less talking as members of parliament—to health professionals from across Australia. This is what I delivered as part of my address.

In regional health, good public policy is partnership. And that partnership is really important in the regions. Regional communities are great places to live because people are connected and care for one another. Communities are invested in the health services that they have. Too often those services are very hard won and never taken for granted. But what we do have is workforce challenges. I've observed a consistent shortfall in the health workforce outside metropolitan areas.

It's worth noting at this point that regional, rural and remote areas cannot always be lumped into one category. They have their own individual challenges and idiosyncrasies, and the Modified Monash Model has attempted to put a framework around this in order to prioritise areas of most need. This can work well when governments have the ethos of respecting that, but there have been examples lately where there has been an attempt to pay the Modified Monash Model lip service, and I believe this has led—and will continue to lead—to poorer outcomes for people outside regional areas. An example of this is the distribution priority area classification and the limited number of medical bonded doctors and overseas trained doctors available to be deployed into areas of workforce need. This has significantly shrunk under the Albanese government's changes to the Modified Monash Model. Automatic inclusion of MM2 as a district priority area has made an incentive that was previously exclusive to rural and remote towns available to regional centres and, perversely, to some areas that are on the fringe of major capital cities.

Along with the distribution of medical professionals, there are three main ways we can increase the numbers in areas outside metro areas: we can recruit from overseas, we can recruit from Australian metro areas into the regions, and we can train people in regional areas. Bringing in healthcare professionals from overseas is essential, and this must never be lost in the necessary discussion we should have about migration in Australia. Another way is to attract people from metro areas to regional, rural and remote areas. But then you have to find a way to keep them. I was involved in an effort, before coming into parliament, called the Greater Shepparton Community Connector Program. Working with local government, we were developing a concierge service—it was based on a successful model in Canada—where new employees and their families were connected by a local representative to help them find the schools, housing, interest groups and networks they needed to make their relocation successful.

A third way is to grow our own—that is, train people outside metro areas. The Melbourne University school of rural health at Shepperton is part of the broader Murray-Darling Basin medical school and a fantastic example put together by the previous coalition government whereby students can do an undergraduate Bachelor of Biomedical Sciences in the regions then graduate into a Doctor of Medicine postgraduate degree. In the case of my electorate, this is in the school of rural health at Melbourne University in Shepperton. The first lot of those graduates will graduate at the end of this year, in a few weeks. Those young people are already connected to the community. Many of them have made family connections and bought houses, and they will practise in the regions. It's a great example of moving tertiary access to people in regional, rural and remote areas so that we can grow our own health workforce.

Again, in my electorate, Melbourne University and Goulburn Valley Health have developed this model to extend health education, and I would like to see that not just in medicine and general practice but also moved into other areas of applied health learning and allied health, such as physiotherapy, nursing and midwifery—the list goes on of the number of students that we can train in regional areas. I'd like to also see that training expanded beyond the Murray-Darling medical school and beyond just medicine. There's so much potential in regional areas for us to train our own. We need to move Commonwealth funded places, to not just have them in the sandstone universities of Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane but also move them out into the regions.

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