Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The GP access after-hours initiative was launched over a decade ago and it is an invaluable service for the Hunter region. The service has several functions, including the coordination of after-hours GP care of more than 240 general practitioners, the triage of patients through a centralised call centre, and the allocation of limited GP appointments in five clinics, including at the John Hunter Hospital, the Westlakes Community Health Centre, in Toronto, in my electorate.

From a public policy point of view, it does not get more efficient than this. The pooled funding model overcomes traditional state and federal funding delineation, and the value that comes from the knowledge sharing and planning between a network of primary healthcare providers ensures the best patient outcomes. Most importantly, it relieves the pressure on our local hospitals' emergency departments.

Labor in government drove the creation of Medicare Locals, which were designed to strengthen primary care and make it easy for people to see a doctor. Drawing on more than two decades of knowledge, firstly as the Hunter Urban Division of General Practice, then as GP Access, the organisation became the Hunter Medicare Local and continued to move from strength to strength, adding the headspace and Partners in Recovery mental health programs, and the Connecting Care program, to its list of services. They set the benchmark in this field and we are proud of this.

So when the Abbott government announced the abolition of Medicare Locals, despite their pre-election promise not to do so, we were concerned about what this new landscape would bring. Under the new regime, Primary Health Networks would no longer deliver services directly to the community, and the structural separation of the founding GP access group was enacted.

Last year, Hunter Medicare Local worked with the New England and Central Coast Medicare Locals to become the successful tenderer for the new Primary Health Network, and unfortunately the government has since then failed to meet each of their own self-imposed deadlines to get this primary healthcare network fully operational, and we are now in a very dangerous situation.

This week's budget included $98 million in funding for the primary health networks around the country. Yet the Health Minister has refused to reveal how much of this will be allocated to the Hunter. This is despite several conversations between my office and the minister's office. In the absence of funding certainty, and with only six weeks to abolition of the Hunter Medicare Local, GP Access have announced that they have no choice but to begin winding down operations. This will impact on the 50,000 patients who use this service each year. This will impact on the hundred nurses employed, and the 250 GPs that are part of this service. I have had personal experience of this through the assistance they provided to my wife, to my daughter and to my mother-in-law, and this service must receive funding certainty if we are to provide the best possible health care to the residents of the Hunter.