"Australians enjoy access to a world class health system with primary care at its centre. Our vital and valued primary care workforce includes Australia’s hard working general practitioners, allied health professionals, primary care nurses, nurse practitioners and midwives, pharmacists, Aboriginal health workers, practice managers and other practice staff. Primary care provides the foundation for universal health care, working hard to keep all Australians healthy and well in the community, and to deliver care that meets the needs of people and communities at all stages of life, no matter where they live.....
Modernising primary care
Recommendations
• Modernise My Health Record to significantly increase the health information available to individuals and their health care professionals, including by requiring ‘sharing by default’ for private and public practitioners and services, and make it easier for people and their health care teams to use at the point of care.
• Better connect health data across all parts of the health system, underpinned by robust national governance and legislative frameworks, regulation of clinical software and improved technology.
• Invest in better health data for research and evaluation of models of care and to support health system planning. This includes ensuring patients can give informed consent and withdraw it, and ensuring sensitive health information is protected from breach or misuse.
• Provide an uplift in primary care IT infrastructure, and education and support to primary care practices including comparative feedback on their practice, so that they can maximise the benefits of data and digital reforms, mitigate risks and undertake continuous quality improvement.
• Make it easier for all Australians to access, manage, understand and share their own health information and find the right care to keep them healthy for longer through strengthened digital health literacy and navigation."
[Strengthening Medicare Taskforce Report December 2022, Introduction opening sentences, p.2 & Modernising primary care, one of four recommendation clusters, p.9]
Last week I 'phoned the GP practice I normally attend when I am unwell seeking an appointment.
Rather than the expected two to three week wait for an appointment I was given a choice of appointment dates that week.
When I entered the four-doctor practice it only had two patients sitting in the waiting room and I made a third.
The situation was almost self-explanatory when I read the signs at reception. The practice was now charging fees payable at time of visit.
A Standard Consultation is $84 (which includes a $10 medical centre facility fee). There is a federal government rebate of $39.75 for patients with a Medicare Card – payable electronically after the $84 is handed over.
The Facility Tax For Professional Services also includes as or when required – a medical centre treatment room fee of $20 and a medical centre consumables fee of $20. There may also possibly be a surcharge applied for public holidays.
There is no bulkbilling of DVA Gold Card Holders and Pension Card Holders until they are over 75 years of age.
As the The Australian Government Actuary is currently not expecting the average 67 year-old to live more than somewhere in the vicinity of another 20.1 years, it would appear that a number of GPs are now willing to lock a significant number older patients out of bulk billing for all but the last 12 years of their remaining lifespans.
So is it any wonder that everyone from the prime minister & state premiers to patients are wondering just how far this corporatisation of primary health care will go and, what workable solutions might be found to correct a dysfunctional primary care system.
An excerpt from The Sydney Morning Herald Economics Editor Ross Gittens’ perspective on the recently updated final report of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce, 8 February 2023:
According to the doctors’ union, the AMA, the reason GPs have become so hard to find is that the federal government isn’t paying them enough. Whereas in the old days half of all medical graduates became GPs, now it’s down to about 15 per cent.
So, pay them more. Problem solved.
What the report’s saying is: sorry, not that simple. It’s true the Coalition government inherited a temporary freeze in Medicare rebates – the amount of a doctor’s bill that’s paid by the feds – in 2013, and continued it until 2018. And although the schedule of rebate payments has been increased annually since then, the increases have been much smaller than inflation.
Why? Partly because the Liberals were trying to prove they could cut taxes without damaging “essential services” such as Medicare.
But also because they knew something was wrong with the way general practice works. They needed to pay GPs differently to do different things. Rather than pay more and more the old way, they’d hold back until they – or some future government – worked up the courage to make changes.
Over the almost 40 years of Medicare, there’s been a big change in the problems people bring to their GPs. Because we’re living longer, healthier lives, much more of our problems are chronic – someone with heart trouble or diabetes has to wrestle with it for the rest of their lives – rather than acute: something that’s easily and quickly fixed.
But the present (subsidised) fee-for-service way of remunerating doctors is designed to suit acute problems, not chronic conditions. It involves waiting for problems to arise, not early diagnosis or stopping chronic conditions getting worse.
It encourages GPs to keep consultations short, avoiding long discussions of multiple problems.
A change no one wants to talk about is the way sole practitioners or partnerships of doctors are giving way to companies owning chains of practices staffed by doctors they employ.
When you separate the person delivering the care from the person watching the bottom line, you increase the likelihood doctors are pressured to keep consultations short and order many tests – a further reason to be cautious about reinforcing GPs’ dependence on fee-for-service.
The report wants to move to “blended” funding, with acute consultations continuing to be fee-for-service, but GPs paid lump sums for developing and managing “care plans” for particular patients with chronic conditions.
While it’s true fewer medical graduates are becoming GPs, it’s not the whole truth. As the Grattan Institute reveals, “Australia has more GPs per person than ever before, more GPs than most wealthy countries, and record numbers of GPs in training”.
How do other countries with good healthcare get by with fewer GPs? By making sure their GPs can’t insist on doing things that could be done by other health workers – nurses, nurse practitioners (nurses trained to do some of the more routine things doctors do), pharmacists and physios.
This is what “co-ordinated, multidisciplinary team-based care” means. Changing GPs’ surgeries into more wide-ranging “primary care clinics” is also about making it easier for patients to move between different kinds of care, with GPs taking more responsibility for the total package, and all the various doctors and paraprofessionals having access to a patient’s medical history.
There’s nothing new about this. Federal governments have been trying to improve the performance of primary care for decades – with little success. Why? Because they’ve had so little co-operation from the premiers and the GPs themselves.
The true message of the latest report is: Medicare reform must not just be about more money to do the same things the same way.
The full 10-page plus cover sheets Strengthening Medicare Taskforce Report can be found at:
https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-02/strengthening-medicare-taskforce-report_0.pdf
The taskforce was formed by the Albanese Labor Government and has 17 members. Its first meeting was held on 29 July 2022 and the taskforce has issued 6 communiques containing meeting minutes.
