Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This weekend I had the pleasure to attend the Flinders Medical Centre with state health minister Chris Picton and some of my state colleagues the member for Davenport, Erin Thompson, the member for Waite, Catherine Hutchesson, and the member for Badcoe, Jayne Stinson. Like much of the country, our health system is under strain, and the most obvious indicator of the challenge is ambulance ramping. Ambulance ramping is, of course, a symptom and not the cause of the problem, and it is caused by bed block in emergency departments and in the hospital. It was great to be able to announce that 20 additional beds are being fast-tracked to help address bed block. This is in addition to the extra 26 new beds already online at Flinders Medical Centre and repat hospital earlier in the year. Flinders Medical Centre is a key tertiary hospital that plays a critical role in South Australia's health system network, particularly providing services to Boothby, the southern suburbs of Adelaide, and the southern regions. The Albanese Labor government committed $200 million, matched by state Labor, to redevelop 40-year-old Flinders and bring it up to current best practice. We absolutely need these services to come online as quickly as possible.

But wait—there's more! Prior to the last election, now Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler announced that Boothby would be one of the sites of an urgent-care clinic to support the Flinders emergency department by giving patients with urgent but not life-threatening health conditions another treatment option. This will be a walk-in option, bulk-billed, no appointment or referral required. It will mean that emergency departments can focus on life-threatening conditions and those with less-serious conditions will be seen faster in more appropriate places. The tender for the Boothby urgent-care clinic has closed, and I am looking forward to what I hope is an imminent announcement.

But again, there's more. We are investing in the Bragg Comprehensive Cancer Centre in the CBD. This is a $77 million federal government commitment that will bring together South Australia's leading cancer researchers, clinicians and technology, and will provide the best education and prevention services, treatment, and long-term care in one coordinated service. The centre will also feature a proton therapy machine which provides targeted radiation therapy, particularly for children or those with head and neck cancers where minimising damage to surrounding tissues is of extreme importance.

We mustn't forget primary care. We have already cut the price of scripts by $12.50, and this has saved people in Boothby over $90,000 collectively this year. This will be followed by 60-day prescriptions being introduced in three tranches, starting 1 September. Enabling patients to fill longer prescriptions for medications that have been risk-assessed as safe improves medication compliance. We have all heard of patients rationing medicine or choosing which prescription to fill because of the cost—this reduces that barrier. We also know that the time when people are most noncompliant with medication is at the end of the packet, perhaps because they forgot to fill the script. With longer prescriptions this risk is halved. Of course, if your prescription is longer, you don't need to go back to the GP so often to get a new prescription, so GP time will be released for other patients. Longer prescriptions are backed by doctor groups, patient groups and nursing groups. I acknowledge the concerns of pharmacy owners, and we'll continue to work with them to address their concerns. The minister has already introduced a number of programs to offset the potential profit-reduction, and I am in favour of expanding scope of practice so that pharmacists can work to their full clinical scope, further freeing up GPs.

Getting back to primary care, the other really exciting thing we are doing is tripling the bulk-billing incentive. I am sure all of us here have heard about the difficulties of finding a bulk-billing doctor anywhere in the country. In November, after six years of Medicare rebates being frozen under those opposite, it is intended that this change will make bulk-billing financially viable again. I hear from doctors that, while the Medicare rebates were frozen, the costs of doing practice weren't—the costs of their staff, of running the service and of the medical supplies weren't. This will make bulk-billing viable again. This government is committed to improving our health system, and we are getting under way at pace.