Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to put on the record tonight an issue that is of great concern to me: access to rural health services for the health and wellbeing of people living in rural communities. Humphreys and Wakerman from Monash University and the Centre for Remote Health in Alice Springs, a joint centre of Flinders University and Charles Darwin University, recently published a discussion paper entitled Primary health care in rural and remote Australia: achieving equity of access and outcomes through national reform. What they found in that report is alarming. Rural and remote Australians have a life expectancy of up to seven years less than their city cousins. This is a university study. It is not me or a political party wheeling out a barrow and trying to push an agenda. This is university research in a highly recognised publication.

The population we describe as rural and remote, as described in the discussion paper, is one-third of the total population. It is seven million people, covering some 7.5 million square kilometres. They have poorer health outcomes due merely to their geographic location. This is a very pertinent issue for the people of outback and rural Australia, the people living in and west of the Great Dividing Range, the people living across the eastern states and certainly the people of the electorate of Maranoa. The electorate of Maranoa covers some 42 per cent of the landmass of Queensland.

I saw a report recently on ABC which should send alarm bells across this nation to legislators. It concerned The Outback Oral Treatment and Health, TOOTH, trial program of the Royal Flying Doctor Service out in rural New South Wales. A dentist who was part of that program was looking at the dental health of the people in north-west New South Wales. What he said should sound alarm bells in every parliamentary corridor in this nation. What he said was that the dental health that he had seen in rural Australia and where he was operating was worse than he had seen in Third World countries.

I recognise the people who are currently out there—the doctors, the nurses, the health professionals—working day to day to bring basic health services to rural Australia. I particularly note the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the great mantle of safety that it provides. The fundamental issue here is access to services and not 'one size fits all'.

In my home town of Roma a few years ago some 4,000 day surgery procedures were sent east of the town. They were funded through Medicare, so it was not a funding issue, but the procedures could not be done in Roma and they were drawing on people from around the area and from further west. The idea that a patient can be transferred to where the major populations live means that the money goes with the patient, and that hospital is then denied that funding because it cannot provide that service. A classic example is maternity services in many parts of my electorate.

I commend the work of the new Queensland Health Minister Lawrence Springborg under the LNP government. He has just announced that the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which is flying obstetrics and gynaecology services out of Roma, is being expanded from 400 flying hours per year to 1,000 flying hours per year. This is about bringing these specialist services out into a broader area across western Queensland. He also wants to reopen obstetric and procedural services in other regional and rural areas. The LNP government under Health Minister Lawrence Springborg is starting to address this issue that has been neglected for so long under Labor governments. (Time expired)