DEAR News Of The Area,

JUST last week I was contacted by a couple of friends who asked me to follow up on their inability to source a bulk-billing GP in the Coffs Harbour, Bellingen and Nambucca areas.

As a former member of the Mid North Coast Area Health Service Board for eight years I have some comments.
This is very disturbing.

We know that hospital emergency departments are being overwhelmed and we know that so-called elective surgery has been delayed in many cases for an unacceptably long time.

Ironically, I write this on the day of the Nurses’ strike.

Funding of our health system is in crisis.

Medicare has been undermined.

Hospitals are clearly understaffed from both a medical and nursing perspective.

Private health insurance is luxury that an increasing number of people cannot afford and the cost keeps increasing as do the “gap” payments.

This situation did not happen overnight and it is in part but not wholly due to the COVID pandemic.

This situation, particularly in NSW, has come about by disinvestment by successive Coalition Governments at a Federal and State level.

I acknowledge the recent capital investments in both the new Macksville, and upgraded Coffs Harbour Health campuses.

These are great facilities but the staffing and activity levels are not adequate to address the health needs of the communities they serve.

We know that a well-supported primary health system should reduce demand on acute hospital and emergency department services but this is not happening.

GPs make a good point when they indicate the frozen levels of rebates for consultations.

They rightly argue that they cannot run their practice businesses on these low rebates and have to charge a co-payment.

Other allied health staff argue that the levels of Medicare rebates are so low that hey cannot meet their costs.
Phycologists recently complained that they were making as little as $12 per hour on Medicare Mental Health Plans.
Even the Federally funded GP Super clinic in Coffs Harbour, built with funding of $19 million from the Federal Government which I helped to secure, no longer offers universal bulk billing.

These practices undermine a healthy community and, in the end, inevitably drive up acute health costs in hospitals.

This did not just happen overnight.

This happened because long term NSW and Federal Coalition Governments caused it through limiting funding, advocating for unsupportable ever lower tax rates, and a reliance on asset sales that only allow for one-off funding such as capital works and the resultant lack of necessary recurrent investment.

What have our local political representatives been doing?

Why have they let this dire situation arise?

Our once enviable National and State health systems have been eroded. We now face a system that is becoming only available to those who can afford to access it.

This is not good enough and our local politicians need to explain what they are doing to fix it.

This would be a change from their usual long term posture of excuses for inaction.

Paul SEKFY,
Yarranbella.