THE Senate Select Committee on Health in Mount Isa revealed serious concerns with funding cuts impacting several organisations in the North West.
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A public forum was held with key health organisations in Mount Isa on Friday, focusing on the committee recording and documenting for policy making in the future and asking what is really going on within the community for health.
The government is cutting $57 billion out of hospitals and the public forum was held in hopes that Mount Isa and the North West would have a recorded voice in the future.
Senator for New South Wales and Chair for the Select committee on Health for the Senate, Deborah Senator O’Neill said the committee was here to ask what is really going on in the North West and what are the particular challenges that Mount Isa and the North West are facing?
“My committee and I are here to hear from health service providers and community members about the impact of reduced federal funding for general practice, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Services, public hospital and other health services.” Senator O’Neil said there were a few key areas that were the focus of the meetings.
“Primary health care focus is clearly on the agenda for the local people here and we have heard about the move to a primary health network away from Medicare Local and a very important collaboration that is going to go on between the hospital and primary health care providers in terms of information sharing,” she said.
“I think that particularly they have made the point that this fragmentation of care means that people aren’t getting to see the same health professionals, that people are flying in and flying out and that someone in a remote community is never seeing the same service provider.
“What we have heard put on the record, there has been a failure to invest in infrastructure to create environments in which working health professionals want to work and want to stay,” she said. “That’s the bad news, the good news is we know that during the period of the Rudd and Gillard governments there was a really significant increase of investment in creating a much larger number of GP’s or doctors training and certainly nurse training.”
