Doctor shortage woes require national fix: report

NewsBot · Jan 18, 2006

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The ABC are reporting:

Doctor shortage woes require national fix: report
The Productivity Commission has recommended an overhaul of Australia's health workforce to help overcome shortages of medical professionals.

In its final report to the Federal Government on the country's medical workforce, the Productivity Commission has recommended health ministers establish a new national agency to increase multi-skilling for medical professionals.

It also wants national registration and accreditation boards.

If the recommendation is accepted, 90 individual boards around Australia would be scrapped and replaced by a single organisation to set standards across the country.

Commissioner Mike Woods says the changes will make the system more efficient.

"Training more of the same is needed in some areas, but it's not the most efficient long term solution," he said.

"For instance, nurse practitioners have been evolving for the last ten years and yet we still only have 100 of them in Australia.

"By having a national accreditation process and a national registration board, innovations that are found to be a national significance can then be quickly rolled out right across the country."

But Dr Choong-Siew Yong from the Australian Medical Association (AMA) is not convinced.

"More committees will not necessarily mean quick solutions down the road," he said.

Dr Yong says registration boards are already being streamlined across state and territory jurisdictions and the Productivity Commission's plan could be difficult to achieve.

"To bring it under the one banner will I think be a long exercise that may be difficult to do," he said.

"More efficiently I think will be for the boards to work together so that we can, when doctors want to move interstate, they can do so easily."

Dr Yong says the plan is too bureaucratic and will not solve the health workforce crisis.

"The Commission's report comes up with a whole lot of very bureaucratic, committee-driven solutions," he said.

"They're proposing a range of new, integrated, over-arching, cross-jurisdictional committees to fix the problem.

"I'm not sure how that will translate to doctors on the ground."

The Commission also recommends state and territory governments be given more say in the number of medical training places offered at universities.
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NewsBot · Jan 21, 2006

Allied health workers welcome proposed shake-up

Another report from the ABC:
Allied health workers welcome proposed shake-up

Nurses, physiotherapists and other health workers could soon be given greater powers and have their services covered by Medicare.

The radical changes are outlined in a Productivity Commission report released today.

It is the biggest shake-up of health services in Australia since the introduction of Medicare.

The report calls for greater use of health workers such as nurse practitioners and physiotherapists.

It says patients should be able to claim visits to those practitioners on Medicare.

"It's very important that we break down the current rigidity that exists, Robert Fitzgerald, from the Productivity Commission, said.

"We need to better utilise the whole of the health work force and part of that is the way in which we fund it."

The current referral system would be scrapped with patients by-passing GPs to go directly from allied health workers to specialists.

"These proposed changes will improve efficiency of the national healthcare system and give better access to all Australians to the healthcare they need," Daniel Finniss, from the Australian Physiotherapy Association, said.

Under the plan, existing registration boards controlled by doctors' groups would be replaced by a central accreditation agency.

"This is not an attack on doctors," Mr Fitzgerald said.

"It's not an attack on the quality of care.

"What it is is saying that demands of the future means we need to do things differently."

But Australian Medical Association (AMA) says the quality of medical care would suffer.

"We have one of the best health care systems in the world and if we take these proposals we may be looking at a much lower standard of care for Australians," Dr Choong-Siew Yong, the vice-president of the federal AMA, said.

The AMA believes the solution is to train more doctors to fill the gaps.

The proposals will be considered at next month's Council of Australian Governments Meeting (CHOGM)
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Link to story

ARB · Jan 22, 2006

An extension to the articles above:

Busting Open Medicare

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17881879%5E23289,00.html

, Jan 22, 2006

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